Hovering patiently above Earth like an monstrous, metal spider, surrounded by drifting debris, the Vizion mothership turned over in its sleep. There was something bored about it, an air of restlessness in its flashing lights and chrome, like an abandoned arcade machine full of ghosts flickering at the back of an old theme park. It didn't look abandoned—it didn't look like something that had expected to be abandoned either. The lights were on, datapads blinking 'low charge' warnings to absent readers, doors left open as though someone had hurried through them in a rush; a weighty uneasiness sat in a smog upon the creaking bones of the structure, it's delicate metal spindles brittle with tension. Unacknowledged in the world below, a hundred eyes wondered at this strange new star and never guessed at its air of apprehension, it's slow-moving seas of dread.

Someone ought to have returned by now, and they hadn't. Now, there lay an open invitation...

Just over the horizon—if the endless blanket of space could be said to have a horizon—there was a second shape, one smaller and sleeker, for all that it was indistinct. Lazily it edged forwards, and as it did so it crept in to the radius of the V.I. ship's sensor array. It did this with a deliberation that was almost coy, and it was disquietingly apparent that this was some form of test that nobody was present to either witness or prevent.

On board the Vizion ship, something in the labyrinthian mass of circuit boards and processors clicked. Whatever vast, mechanical brain operated that place was now intimately aware that it was being watched. Banks of unattended monitors surged to life with a unified groan of synth, each running through their own list of figures before flashing a code. Had Phil been present, he would have recognised it immediately; it was a code he had hacked from those computers, a time that had been, all at once, a minute and seven years ago.

4 7 0 1

The sequence for the ship's chameleonic devices.

But there was nobody onboard to activate such measures and the warnings went unheeded. In a manner almost smiling, the unidentified ship eased its way closer, a cosmic crocodile in a night sky river, and, with every inch it gained, more V.I. systems roused themselves with soundless screams. Soon, the control room was a frenzy of neon and white light, the low note of an alarm the wailing lungs to counterpart a strobing heartbeat.

Behind the first ship trailed a thousand siblings, each of them an identical twin. Above the defenceless Earth, a million look-a-like mockeries converged on the Vizion mothership in silence, splitting open at the belly and disgorging metal cables that moved with a dreadful liveliness. They bound themselves to the larger ship in a net—in a shroud—a stranglehold of knotweed which drew itself tighter and tighter. It squirmed its way in to every crevice until, with a final, wretched screech, the alarm fell silent and the light of the Vizion star went out.


Another week passed, and with time came a new normalcy. Tension cannot last indefinitely, stretched in to the infinite; the sinews of a person's worry will become accustomed to the strain and adjust. Of course, it was still deeply weird to come downstairs in the morning to be told 'good morning' by aliens, and nothing would ever prepare Phil for the sight of Quiz and Diz doing the dishes together, but the fear had gone out of the situation. They'd all had worse roommates—the aliens didn't play drum and bass at 3am, didn't cultivate bacteria cultures in the communal fridge, and none of them had weird, hobo boyfriends who showed up and conducted questionable deals in the living room. As far as housemates go, a failed attempt at world domination isn't an insurmountable drawback.

It was early evening, an 'almost' hour, the sky having entered a wonderful lilac phase in its slow waltz towards dusk, and Phil was sat, once more. at the kitchen table in Smiley's mother's house. As the old woman had commented in a slightly pointed voice, the four of them were well on the way to becoming permanent boarders (an apologetic offer to relocate had been refused, so Phil didn't think she actually minded.) In slightly more usual times, the kitchen was a communal space, designed for socialising. It had an expectant aspect to it, an air of anticipation for parties Mrs Sundae was too austere to throw.

In a fashion, Phil was there to socialise; for whatever peculiarity of architecture decides such things, the kitchen had the best internet of anywhere in the house.

"Guys? Chubb's back on the line!"

Phred's cheering echoed from upstairs as he was hoisted back inside the window he'd been hanging out of to try and get the lost signal back, followed by a series of comical crashes from the stairway as the absent members of the group made their way downstairs: Smiley in a librarian-esque sweater and skirt, complete with superfluous glasses on a necklace chain; Zach in a pair of singed jeans, a hot new style he'd invented and popularised himself; and Phred, his work shirt on backwards (but not inside out, which was an improvement.) Without grace or regard for personal space, they clustered around Phil and, consequently, a laptop, where a gently flashing screen and jaunty ringtone were heralding a call from the username 'Fat_Man43V3R'—Last Online 2 Weeks Ago.

When everyone was settled, Phil joined the call, and the monitor began broadcasting a video feed of Chubb, taken from a terrible low angle which gave him approximately seventy chins.

"—llo? hello, hello? Can you hear me now?"

"Loud and clear, Chubb, we're back online."

By virtue of the small size and geographical irrelevance of their little city, many of the people from Phil's Elementary had wound up attending his High School and, consequently, his Sixth Form. Chubb had been one of them. Several years ago he had ventured Europe for a convention on frankfurters and wursts and had enjoyed the food there so much he'd made the move permanent. He had amassed quite the online following for his review-based blog, which detailed the highlights of every restaurant he visited during his various travels.

Every so often he called home, and this was one of the calls he made.

"So how's life?" Zach asked, his very presence throwing the brightness value in the viewfinder off. The crowding of friends in the camera's eye looked as though they were sitting around a campfire. Chubb was standing on a balcony in early afternoon light, squinting against the sunbeams, face crinkled in a warm smile.

"Not bad, you?"

There was a second where the group froze, took an introspective look at the weeks prior, and decided to let Phil handle it. There was another second where Phil recognised this delegation and mentally gave them all the middle finger. Altogether, it made for something of an awkward pause.

"Oh, just the usual..."

Chubb laughed, the synchronicity of the sound and movement decoupled by distance.

"Something really weird?"

"What makes you say that?"

"It's always something weird with you guys. Remember Year Twelve? With the raccoons and the air vents? And the vending machine heist? And the jelly baby funeral that got the science wing closed down for a week?"

"Lies," Phred protested. "Lies and slander. None of that was anything to do with us, you can't prove it."

"Alright—what are you up to, then?"

"Oh, you know..."

Without quite meaning to, Phil glanced above the laptop screen to Diz, who was sat at the opposite end of the island and was watching the exchange with something that bordered on suspicion. They made eye contact, Diz's curiosity cool and smooth as marbles inside Phil's head. Never taking his eyes from the alien, Phil gave Chubb a halfhearted shrug.

"... Nothing much. Meeting old acquaintances, catching up—playinghousewiththosepsychoaliensfromthatonetimeschoolwasinvaded—trying to get Saturday off. You?"

"Uh huh, repeat that last one?"

"'Trying to get Saturday off'?"

Chubb snorted fondly and muttered something that sounded like 'idiot' under his breath.

But he didn't pry further. Instead, he launched happily into a story about his new favourite restaurant and Phil, having no use for the specifics of authentic French cuisine and still locked in a staring contest with Diz, was excused from the conversation.

Government agents still surrounded the suburbs with all the grace and innate secrecy of children playing hide and seek. Completely oblivious to the aliens directly under their noses as they were, they still presented a significant threat. Randomly lethal and entirely confused, their unpredictability made them a constant difficulty; it was impossible for the aliens to go outside, impossible for the quartet of humans to talk about the situation outside, impossible for any of them to throw away bandages and syringes without inviting the possibility that scientifically curious raccoons would claw the secrets from between the potato peelings come bin day. Planning their departure was something of a ballroom dance, with partners that were determined to stay as completely separate from each other as possible.

The aliens were—as far as Phil could tell or be bothered to work out—near enough fine to begin their plotting again. Or, more accurately, Viz and Diz had returned to plotting; Quiz seemed cautiously exasperated with them both. After being given the medical 'all clear' to move again, the three had taken to avoiding each other as best they could in the cramped accommodations; often, this simply meant inhabiting different corners of the same room and stubbornly ignoring the others' existence, like a bunch of cats sitting on the same, incrementally-elevated object. Phil was slightly depressed by the fact that megalomaniac alien dictators giving each other what was essentially the silent treatment no longer surprised him.

Precisely what plans were being concocted Phil didn't know, but he could sense them, their sticky, spiderweb strands catching feather-light against his awareness of the world. They spun out in reams between Viz and Diz, in watchful and expectant silence. He hadn't seen either of them actually talk to each other in days, but that had yet to impact the sense that the two were somehow synced. Every limited interactions had the tenor of two people who are so accustomed to each other's way of thinking that they can work around the other mind without direction or instruction.

Quiz sat on the outside of this, placidly oblivious.

It made Phil nervous, a crackle of electricity prickling the base of his tongue. There was something the aliens were hiding. There was something they weren't telling him—there were things they weren't telling each other. And even in Phil's own little group, there were hairline fractures, thin but deep, inside which nestled unsaid things. Everything was so very calm, and yet, just over the horizon lay a hundred things that had yet to happen, and he could hear it coming like the marching of a hundred feet. He felt that, at any second, something would—

Something shrieked. Back in the kitchen, a hideous, garbled roil of static boiled the air, and Phil woke from his reverie as though from a brief, clammy nightmare.

"Whoa, what the hell? We losing signal again?"

"You're all good Chubb. That was just the radio." Reaching over Phred, Smiley fiddled with the laptop and turned the volume all the way up. Her manner was one of determined normalcy, like a bright sun, the sort of affectation one would use to ignore a disruptive child. "So what did the chef do, after you asked for barbecue sauce on the crepe?"

For several days now, things had been going missing and appliances had stopped working: light bulbs had vanished from lamps; the guts of the toaster disappeared; the microwave stopped working for no visible reason; the buttons and batteries vanished from the remotes; all the chargers and bits of wire were spirited away for some unknown purpose. All of it culminated in this—a machine sat on the table before Diz, the source of the growing racket. Once, it had been a portable radio. Now, there were cables hooking the contraption into the mains (exposed through inadvisably unscrewed sockets) and the casing had been cracked open to admit all manner of additions. The result was a spectacular malformation of metal, sinister in its ambiguity, in its bulges and spindles and strings, it's breached boundaries and ill-defined confines.

During the last few hours it had sat silently as it's odd angles were cobbled together by Diz's unsteady hands, and now it had started to scream.

With none of the caution one should express in such situations, Zach confronted the alien and Phred pulled out his phone. There was a sizeable video folder on said phone titled 'Play These At My Funeral'—so named because he and Zach both fully expected at to die pissing one of the aliens off. Phil wasn't sure this jovial acceptance (and, indeed, embrace) of one's imminent demise was healthy, but it was going to make for one hell of a eulogy.

To this end, Phred dutifully began filming as Zach draped himself over the island to ensure his face was as uncomfortably close to Diz as possible. Doing this also put him in worryingly close proximity with the erstwhile radio, which was emitting a tingly heat that quickly numbed his cheek.

Zach ignored this. Zach had ignored far worse than potential radiation poisoning for The Bit.

"What are you doing?" He asked in a throaty hiss, like a small, indignant cobra.

"I'm fixing the radio."

"No you're goddamn not. Look at it. None of that is what fixed looks like." All eyes (bar Chubb's) were briefly directed to the radio, barely box shaped, pouring coils, and wires, and lights like bulging eyes. Something deep within it was vibrating, causing the mangled whole to shiver with a frightened animal vigour. In a conciliatory fashion, Diz turned a dial until the shrill wail shrunk to a whine, but this didn't help the fact that the thing existed at all. "What is it really? Some kind of bomb? A mind control device? An improvised tiny robot servant?"

"It's a radio, Zach," Diz replied with surprising patience. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Now that the chaos had simmered down, Diz was back to his calm, collected self, which was terrifying in light of what was lying just beneath the mask's surface. Phil had never expected to miss the half-crazed psychotic who had stared him down as though he could reach across the vacuum of space and kill him through sheer force of will, but there was something to be said about the value of certainty. That creature, in it's antipathy and violence, was coiled like a snake within Diz's skull, waiting to strike—he just couldn't see it anymore. It was the difference between a large spider being nice and visible on the wall, or having it be hidden and probably in your shoe or pants. The spider not being in the room with you wasn't an option. Phil could feel the lieutenant's brutal malignancy crawling over him in the dark and it made him shudder in a way Viz, in all his callous and grandeur, could never hope to achieve.

"Yo, who's the new guy?" Chubb asked, having overheard the hissed discussion. He waved, though nobody new had appeared on the screen. "Hi new guy."

"He's nobody," Phred dismissed hurriedly. "Besides, we haven't told you about the old guys yet. I saw Ritchie last week—guy gave me a ticket for walking too fast. It was written in crayon. I think that means the bastard's all good."

"Greg's fallen back asleep," Phil offered, leaping on the attempt to steer the conversation away from the 'new guy' as possible. "He passed half his driving test this time. Job office has decided he has a bright future in tax returns."

"Hannah's doing well, she seems really happy." Smiley idly twirled a lock of hair around her fingers. "She says she and Harrison want to start trying IVF for a baby next year... I told her I think it's a little soon because saying 'Hannah you married a fire axe and should probably not have children with it' seemed a little mean."

"It was a beautiful wedding, though."

"Oh, it was."

"What is this?" Diz's bemusement meant that it wasn't quite a snap, but it was a question asked sharply enough to trigger the animal instincts just under Phil's skin.

"Just catching up with friends," he placated, feeling very much as though he were asking a bomb to not go off. "What, you don't have that in space?"

"You say that like he has friends to catch up with," Zach muttered, not under-his-breath enough to go unheard.

A clicking sound like snapped fingers sounded from somewhere in Diz's throat. Nothing about his expression changed. He didn't blink. He didn't take his eyes off of Phil.

"Your lunacy is... irritating."

"Ha!" Zach slapped the alien on the shoulder, a terrifyingly inadvisable thing to do. "I get it. Like the moon." Everyone stared at him (Chubb included.) "Luna-cy? See it?"

"Ahhhhh, alien jokes—classic." With tact and good humour born of nerves, Phred hauled Zach upright again and encouraged him away from the suddenly very still maniac. "But seriously, I think that was Diz's creepy way of telling us to shut up before he throws a planet at us or something."

"Can he do that?" Turning to Diz before anyone could either answer or stop him. "Can you do that?"

The alien had the completely calm, yet slightly calculating expression of someone who is considering precisely that question themselves. Hurriedly, Phil put himself back in Diz's metaphorical crosshairs.

"Besides the point guys. The point is the radio." That black, basilisk stare slithered back over Phil's skin. "Are you trying to create a device to induce strokes, because I'm feeling kinda aneurysm-y right now. What the hell have you done to it?"

As if to demonstrate the abominable tech further, Diz twisted the dials through the stations, every frequency home to its own wretched, tuneless song. Each note was plucked from some hellish harp whose hit singles were comprised of yowling cats, tinnitus, and the hollow-throated boom of the atom bomb. From the pleased expression on his face, it seemed this outcome was anticipated, even promising.

"Nothing irreparable, and nothing I won't fix later, don't worry."

"I'm worried."

"I engineered all our other equipment. You should trust me to know what I'm doing."

Zach laughed, Phred scoffed, Phil raised his eyebrows as high as they would go.

"You are the least trustworthy thing in this room. And that's saying a lot in a room with an microwave that spontaneously combusts."

"And a guy that spontaneously combusts."

"That is accidental and due to allergies," Zach exclaimed in an exaggeratedly aggrieved tone. "Smiley deliberately has a gun."

(Everything in Phil turned to cold gel, and he slowly turned to look at Diz. The alien—who had, until this juncture, returned to following the conversation with flickers of his eyes—was staring raptly at him, something victorious and vibrant pulling faintly at the corner of his mouth. A visceral shimmer coursed through the air between them, seizing Phil by the collar and dragging him nose to lack-of-nose with Diz. Of all the things he would have wanted the aliens to know, that was not one of them—particularly if the alien that found out was Diz, someone whose mental stability he was not fully convinced of. Quiz might steal the gun to have the upper hand; Viz would shoot anyone he thought capable of getting in his way; Diz was an volatile unknown quantity, and Phil fully believed the alien would shoot people for the cathartic fun of it.)

Beyond this inner turmoil, The Japes continued.

"You sneeze napalm."

"Only because you mistake my antihistamines for mints and eat them all. Pick on Phil, he attempted homicide when he was eleven."

"Yeah, on a scale of one to ten."

"We all know you just scored one twice."

"Excuse you, I was saving the world."

"Cool motive, still murder."

"Why are you harping on my dark transgressions? Go back to Phred."

"It's hard to beat murder accusations—lotta funny jokes in homicide."

"We have a friend who married a fire axe. You're telling me there's no material in that?"

"Do you have to do this here?" Diz interrupted, now very clearly exasperated. For someone who dealt with Quiz on a daily basis, the alien had a surprisingly low threshold for nonsense.

"Yeah. This room has the good wifi." Which, Phil realised, seconds later, was likely why Diz had chosen it for his centre of operations. "Who are you trying to listen to anyway? Elvis?"

Diz's face, still mask-like, lost some vital something that had made it look alive, the brightness behind his eyes hollowing out in to nothingness. There was a stark impression of a door being slammed in one's face.

"Classified," he said blankly. "Go back to your... conversation."

This was an order rendered impossible to obey by the next alteration made to his machine; a tightening of a bolt, a tentative prodding of a piece of wire, and—

To say that it was white noise would be an indescribable understatement. Though it had no substance and no structure, and it was certainly noise, it wasn't mindless static. It was a concentrated assault from a vengeful army of sound, a buzzing, vibrant hurricane that swirled and gibbered without end. Voices—that did not sound at all like voices, but like shoes on wet gravel and tearing paper—raved in millions of languages, speaking over each other, arguing and screaming. Electronic sounds fought with organic on every frequency imaginable in a way which disturbed the blood and forced the heart to dance to a maniac tempo. It seemed to stamp against the eardrums with a savage glee. A fire was lit within the mind, the damp electricity of the brain coming frightfully alight, and everything in the world was reduced to noise.

No. No, it couldn't have just been noise; noise which isn't ear-splittingly loud isn't supposed to hurt.

"What the fuck?!" Phred mouthed, eyes blown wide with horror. Well, no—he probably wasn't mouthing. In any other circumstance, a less loud circumstance, he probably would have been shouting. "Turn it off!"

Despite his closeness to the epicentre of this audiological assault, Diz did not seemed phased; perhaps there were some benefits to having no outer ear.

"Oh, relax," the alien exclaimed, all exasperation. "I just need to narrow the margins. Honestly—" Long, clever fingers turned dials with impatient expertise. "—children."

What followed was hardly any better; there was only one voice, sure, but that voice was harried and garbled beyond comprehension. It spoke some twisted version of English that even the strangest of gutter-slang and outdated vocabulary couldn't have comprised, with words that seemed to sit precariously on the verge of being understood.

There was something very familiar about it... something in the accent, about the crisp way the consonants clicked.

Very slowly, the little group unfurled, full of shudders.

"Satan," Zach whispered, staring wide-eyed and haunted. "Satan in the radio. Satan is a radio."

Slowly, Phil lowered his hands from where he'd instinctively clasped them to his ears, puzzle pieces falling in to place in his head. They formed a picture he didn't much like.

"You weren't programming the radio for Earth frequencies, were you?"

A glimmer of derisive amusement appeared briefly in Diz's eyes before dying again. Very slowly, with the gentle condescension of one humouring a slow child, he shook his head.

"I never claimed to be." Rasping a knowing chuckle, the alien waved a dismissive hand and turned back to his work. "Now, either be silent or get out. I need to hear this."

'Don't need to tell us twice, creepy git.' Time to beat a strategic retreat. Stealthily, Phil took Smiley's hand and it squeezed his own tight. Nobody tried to argue or express a desire to remain in the kitchen.

"C'mon, Chubb." Phred seized the laptop and walked backwards out the door. "We're taking this party to the roof."

"Alright. Bye, new dude. Hope you fix your stereo... or whatever was going on over there... man, that made my bones hurt."

They filed out. Phil was the last to leave, and he maintained firm eye contact with Diz—who, despite his own assertion, was paying the radio very little attention—until the closing door came between them. In its own way, the gesture had been a struggle for power and, even as he moved from one battle to the next, Phil couldn't have said who won.

On their way to the roof, they passed through the living room, where the heavy curtains had been drawn to allow the alien inhabitants their freedom. Taking full advantage of this, Viz was sprawled inelegantly across one of the sofas, legs draped off the arm, crossed at the ankles in arrogant repose. As he had been since Diz broke them, the captain was toying with his shades; all he really seemed to be doing was unplugging and splicing wires together but no one had quite gathered the nerve to question him on it. There was a dent in the seat of the nearby armchair, a sure sign that someone had vacated it recently, the day's newspaper folded over the arm—either Mrs Sundae or a particularly brave Quiz had been sat there until recently. Viz glanced up as they entered, decided he was better off ignoring them, and went about it with such efficiency that the gang may as well have never existed.

They made their way up to the second floor and, from there, they climbed, one by one, out of the office window and on to the roof. The brickwork and gutters were sunlight-warm beneath Phil's hands, the tiles rough and familiar. This had been their clubhouse as teenagers, the site of many summer sleepovers and nighttime picnics where they cooked marshmallows over the fires of Zach's head.

With a showman's flourish, Phil laid out his hoodie and offered Smiley the best seat in the house in the lee of the chimney stack; she accepted this gallantry with a playful curtesy, a hand to her face to disguise a slight blush. Zach and Phred made the appropriate exaggerated gagging sounds.

They remained there for a while, painted purple by the light through the lavender clouds, laughing with a slightly distorted voice from the other side of the world until Chubb had to sign off. Smiley left not long after.

"I'd love to stay longer, but the library closes in half an hour, and I have to get there quickly if I want to be locked in." She wasn't looking at any of them, busy rifling through her shoulder bag for books and keys. She pressed a dry kiss to Phil's cheek. "I need to get going."

"Thought you were all caught up on coursework?"

"Oh, I am, but there's no harm in trying for extra credit!" Smiley bit her lower lip, something she'd been doing too often recently—Phil could see the faint indentations her persistent teeth had made in the soft, pink surface. There was a brightness fixed to her face, as obviously counterfeit as a TV presenter's perfect teeth; it was the kind of hopeful, reassuring look that only required the slightest of alterations to become frightened. "I'll see you later."

Tenderly, Phil picked a leaf from a stray tangle of windswept hair. He wanted to reassure her, but there wasn't time—he hardly knew which worry was making her smile so shadowed.

"I'll be waiting," he promised instead, and, just like that, Smiley's warmth was real again, something eased in her dark eyes.

"I'll be snogging Phil in your absence."

"I'll be filming as Zach 'falls' off the roof."

"Goodbye, everyone!" Smiley shouted as she slipped back in through the window. A minute later, Phil heard the front door slam and saw her slight figure, made further diminutive by distance, jogging towards the bus stop by the main road. Before it was lost from sight, the figure turned and raised its hand in a wave, sunlight streaming in gold ribbons through its fingers; Phil was too slow to return the gesture. By the time he tried, the shape of his girlfriend had vanished between the houses.

Another breath of wind sighed it's chill through Phil's bones, and he folded his arms back around his body, like a bird sheathing its wings. The fading summer was full of a contradictory cold warmth, a tepidness that tasted of mango and marigold, and the world felt like an old memory, simultaneously finite and infinite. He would never be here again; a part of him would be here always. He tilted his head back and admired the empty sky, the smokescreen behind which hid so many stars. How strange it was to think he'd once been up there among them; if he strained his memory, he could recall the pressure on his bones as the world swallowed the escape pod down a throat laden thick with cloud.

How strange to think he'd once held the fate of this wondrous blue marble in one hand.

Phil looked again to the streets. All those houses, stretching miles in to the distance, full of people who had no idea they'd all almost died horribly seven years ago. That they had won an unholy gamble on the scratch-card luck of one tenacious child being in the right place at the right time.

And there was such a taste of old exhilaration in that thought, finely aged in to something almost heady. For a second, Phil understood why people might think it fun to jump off cliffs.

He wondered what it was like to not know. What was it like to sit so entirely outside such a pivotal point in world history? What was it like to not have memories of searing blue light and marrow-deep cold? What was it like to live a peaceful existence, too stupid to care you'd been saved?

"Which is worse, d'ya think—ignorance or apathy."

"Don't know," Phred answered. "Don't really care, either. You thinking of leaving us plebs and joining Smiles in Philosophy 9000?"

"Hell no, you know that professor only speaks Latin."

Like the sea, silence lapsed over them and Phil gently released his thoughts. That was where they stayed for an undetermined amount of time—sprawled across the roof as the sun went down like a battleship and the lovely world was doused in night. The street lamps donned their golden hats and went gaily about their trade, and the lanes once enjoyed by pedestrians were ballrooms for bats and foxes.

Then, from inside, came a voice, scratchy and hard-edged with lethargy:

"Viz!" It barked. "Quiz! Come here; I have news."

With the sleepiness instilled in him by darkness thoroughly dissipated, Phil hurried to the window and leaned carefully out over the edge of the roof. Through the half-drawn curtain, he saw two distinctive, four-armed shapes march in the direction of the kitchen, where they had earlier abandoned Diz to his devices.

Studiously, Phred and Zach said nothing. They lay on their backs, faces turned towards the stars, beloved by courts of moths and fireflies. Neither looked after Phil as he left.

Back in the warmth of the house, Phil felt the gooseflesh of his forearms grow keener. His every nerve shimmered like moonlight on water and something slightly nauseous rolled in his stomach. With his ear pressed against the softwood of the kitchen door, Phil could just barely hear the birds-wing flutter of voices, the hushed conversation happening in the room beyond and, beside it, the low, eager thrumming of his own blood-red heart.


The light through the kitchen window had long since faded, from lavender, to periwinkle, to royal, to navy, to nothing. Diz sat in the dark, the malformed radio cradled between his hands as it struggled through its relays. Beside him lay a notepad and a pen, the former filled with illegible scrawlings (this is to say both that the alien's language was indecipherable by human standards and that Diz had terrible handwriting.) Over the course of several hours, Diz had noted down every transmission the monitoring system spat out and it hardly mattered now that darkness had stolen the specifics of the letters from him; he could remember them perfectly. He saw no reason to turn the light on.

At long last, the machine gave in and the feed churned itself to meaningless hissing sound like crumpling paper, a glitter of sparks flaring from splintered wires. No matter; he had what he needed.

Raising his voice was not a prospect he relished, but he needed the others so—

"Viz. Quiz. Come here, I have news." Wincing, Diz raised a hand to his throat where rusty needles had worked their way in to tender flesh. His words tasted broken and metallic.

He was still rubbing at his neck when his crew mates entered; Viz with his ubiquitous scowl, Quiz scuttling behind him with his quartet of arms braided about his chest.

"This had better be good Diz," Viz snapped, striding in to the room with a brisk arrogance, recovered enough that his scratchy bark was only a shade softer than usual. Protocol demanded that Diz stand as his captain entered, and so he did, though it did nothing to improve his temper. He felt... disjointed, like a doll that had been poorly put back together.

Still, he would mend. He always did.

Viz sneered about the darkened room, and flicked the light on. Doing this brought into hideous visibility the metal mass crowding the table and Viz's sneer listed quickly into disdain. "What is that?"

"It's a radio—"

"Doesn't look like a radio," Quiz interjected in a dubious voice, leaning warily out of range. "Are you sure it won't explode?"

Diz bit his tongue and pretended this accounted for the taste of blood in his mouth.

"Do you want to know what I've found, or not?" Already looking rather sick of the matter, Viz waved a hand for him to proceed. "I have been monitoring the radiation activity of our ship—from what I can tell, nothing's set any of the sensors off. Some of the signals cut off before I could receive a full transmission, but that's nothing new."

So much of their equipment was old, repossessed from other derelict vessels and cobbled together in to new machines, it was never a surprise when something ceased to work as it had been designed. Their long-range scanners had a nasty habit of being more mid-range, and both sonar and radar had wildly different opinions on just about everything. Still, Diz had gathered enough evidence from enough sources that he was confident in saying theirs was the only ship up there.

"Were you able to access the database? The command console? Controls?"

"Nothing so helpful, but I can say that I don't think we're being followed."

Predictably, Viz face twisted.

"'Think' isn't good enough. If you can't contact our ships, how do you propose we get out of here? That was the job I gave you, was it not?"

It was, but the reminder nettled. He didn't often try to placate Viz, but he was tired. And if he gave in to the hurricane swirling at the centre of his being and screamed, Viz would join him and then everything really would be lost.

(He hated that too. He hated how petty and small the rage made him feel in the face of his captain's chill distaste. He wanted them both to be screaming, even if it wouldn't get them anywhere.)

"We have time, Viz."

Agitation took Viz over, as sudden and brief as lightning; he slammed his open palms down on the tabletop. He seemed restrained from pacing only by the desire to glare in to his subordinate.

"Have you forgotten Atsilon 12? The firefight at Nox Anmarr? The gutting of Satellite Station 47? Have you somehow remained oblivious to every atrocity we've committed these past twelve years? Every officer we've killed, every ship we destroyed, everything we've stolen? This is the moment they've been waiting for; we've not stood still like this in a decade at least. We are lying on a serving dish and you have the nerve to tell me we can wait."

'Forget? How could I ever forget?'

Diz ground his teeth; of course he remembered. The evidence stacked against them all was insurmountable, and with every action they added to it, the accumulation of their eventual punishment daunting to consider but persistent in the back of all their thoughts. He despised it, the perpetual reminder of how precarious their position in the stars truly was. To Diz's mind, judgment was theirs to mete out to the rest of the universe, and the thought of receiving it before they had seen their purpose to its end was bitterly galling.

"I am aware that we don't have infinite time—" Viz cut him with a sharp rap of knuckles against tabletop.

"So get on with the report," he spat, and Diz felt something in his jaw crack. "Why can't you access the ships' remote controls? I know you built them with the capability."

'Just finish the report. Just get through it one more time.'

"Automatic systems engaged as a safeguard after our absence extended beyond five days. We'll need to provide retinal scans to disengage the system locks on almost everything."

"Have you tried to hack through it?"

"One false step and our firewall will signal the magnetic coils in the engine to flare and fry every motherboard and hard drive on-board. If you're alright with the idea of me reducing our whole enterprise to dead metal, I'll be sure to give it a go."

The air in the room was full of dry-weather static, the sort that precedes either storms or forest fires. Viz finally gave in to pacing in the limited space—four steps to the wall, four steps back, the action repeated over and over in tense, harried movements that ratcheted an invisible wire to a cutting edge. Silent, as he was during most confrontations between leader and lieutenant, Quiz stood off to one side and followed the movements with damp, worried eyes. He glanced occasionally towards Diz with something similar to appeal and impatience flickering in his face; 'do something' he seemed to say.

Diz ignored him. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven Quiz's disaffection. Finally, Viz returned to the table, appearing no calmer than before.

"You didn't call me here to tell me you have nothing."

"I didn't." His notes were crisp and expectant under his fingers; he shuffled them in search of the specific readout and, finding it, pushed it towards Viz. "When I was panning for radiation signatures operating on our wavelengths, I found that there was something of ours operational on Earth. It's my ship, it's still online."

"Where is it?" Viz snatched the piece paper up, scowling at the barely legible script.

Despite himself, Diz hesitated.

"You won't like it."

"Just tell us, damn you."

"Signals are coming from inside Zone 5.1."

Viz swore bitterly. Beside him, Quiz wilted, suddenly refusing to meet Diz's eye at all.

Which was an altogether reasonable move—there was no way to be ignorant of the fact that Diz blamed him for the entire situation.

'If you had just stayed where I told you to...'

Silently, Viz began sorting through the sheaf of papers related to the Earthbound ship. Though the glasses forbore any real change in expression, as seconds turned to minutes, his silence grew gradually darker.

"That's okay, isn't it," Quiz finally piped up, a guilty quirk at the corner of his smile. "Zone 5.1 is ours."

"Was ours," Viz corrected grimly. "It's been nearly a decade, and there was really no one left in charge of the place. Anything could have happened to it."

"So we should sneak in," Quiz suggested, still sounding hopeful. "Steal the ship back."

Everything was so very simple in Quiz's world. Sometimes Diz envied him for it. How nice it would be, to be so utterly undeterred by simple things like reality and consequence. It fascinated him sometimes, that over a decade had passed and Quiz still had that offensive innocence, that security in his old invulnerability.

(The worst of it was the trust. The belief that he and Viz could do anything. The absolute faith in a lie, and the fact that such a lie was the only good thing Quiz could believe of his teammates.)

Finding no answers in the notes, Viz turned back to their writer.

"... Has that base been compromised?"

"Unclear." Diz scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly very tired. "Their admin system indicates they acquired a new director, but I can't find mention of a name."

"You're telling me your best idea is to wander over there with no idea about what we'd be walking in to?" And there was the anger again, flaring like candlelight given air. "Useless. No ship, no weapons, sending us in to an ambiguous situation on the off-chance it gets us out. Are you trying to see us caught by The Enquiry?"

And Diz snapped. In the end, it never took much.

"Might I remind you that I have done everything?" Suddenly Viz was close, very close; Diz didn't remember moving, but he could hear Quiz skittering away like a mouse. "When you have a skill set half as useful as mine to bring to the table, I'll give you full permission to critique my ideas. Until then, keep your mouth shut."

'This better. This is familiar. We've been here before.'

"I don't need your permission, soldier." With his usual roughness, and a surprising amount of strength given his recent injury, Viz seized his lieutenant by the collar and threw him backwards. His stitched sneer was full of genuine disgust. "You forget your place."

"You forget that you need me." Quickly, the two were nose to nose again; Diz could see his own snarling face reflected dully in Viz's angular lenses. "I'm the only one of us capable of getting a starship out of the galaxy."

"Do you want a medal?"

Diz didn't answer. His spit tasted bitter with the vehemence of the things he wanted.

"Um... I-I think you've both forgotten the point of this." Quiz, querulous and uncertain, was pressed as deeply as he could manage into the far corner, twisting all four of his hands together in a terrified lattice. The look he directed at them both was one of flinching revulsion.

"Shut it Quiz," Viz snarled. But the reprimand came too late and the tension was broken.

For a long moment, though they were no longer fighting, they remained close enough to feel each other's breath. The implicit knowledge that they—all three of them—were snared together through necessity struck Viz like a visible blow. Even Quiz, arguably the most useless member of Vizion, was now integral to any escape they might attempt to make.

Finally, Viz conceded ground, stepping back and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"There is no other option?" He ground out.

'Stay here and argue until we die.'

"Not that I can find." Unwilling and unable to offer comfort, Diz begrudgingly continued. "As it currently stands, we are alone in the solar system—how long that will last, I can't say. Zone 5.1 is no less safe than anywhere else and it is the only place on Earth with a starship. Whatever we do... we need to get it done quickly."

Silence. Knowing silence.

"Well..." As usual, Quiz's ambivalent stammerings were cut in half like a length of ribbon by the harsh mouth of a pair of scissors.

"We'll do it."

In another life—a less complicated life—that would have been it for the Vizion crew. They would have left in the night, vanished from that quaint suburban house as though they had never existed, and attacked the facility alone. The inevitable failure would have seen them spirited away to laboratories and prison cells, and nobody would have ever known or cared. Phil would have been left with his mysteries and his questions but, like the Vizion project itself, they would have burned themselves out eventually; a human life is, after all, only so long...

But that isn't how the story goes.

Behind Diz, the door creaked on its hinges, a long, deliberate note that rubbed the scales on the back of his neck the wrong way. An immediate alertness shot through all three, though Diz and Viz were the only two to react—the former by snatching up a screwdriver and the latter by pushing the weaker two back.

With the drama of a dead showman, the door swung inwards.

Phil. Phil Eggtree, the child they had stolen, and tested, and tried to kill, all grown up and watching them. His narrow frame filled up the doorway as efficiently as a brick wall. The boy's mouth had cut a sharp quirk in to his cheek, a smile of both distaste and amusement at a joke Diz could only guess at. Lights danced in his eyes, reflections of some greater glory nobody else could see. He looked in to the midst of their beings as though they were the most fascinating things in the world

"Oh, you can bet you've got explaining to do."


"So... who's after you, exactly?"

They were seated about the island, one at each edge with Viz and Diz doubled up on the left side. Interrogating the aliens was a disconcerting experience, Phil found; none of them were forthcoming in any fashion. It was like shifting puzzle pieces in the dark and trying to guess what picture they would grow to be.

Didn't mean he'd stop, though.

"You don't need to know that, Eggtree. Just accept that we have been here for far too long already." Viz was acting as the group's reticent spokesman, grinding out each sentence as though it were being torn forcibly from his chest.

"You think these 'somebodies' are catching up, though?"

"They might be. It's something we risked by lingering about Earth for our experiment. Suffice to say, we expected to get away with it. Some people—" Quiz flinched as both aliens turned to glare at him. "—Have compromised that recently, but if we act swiftly there remains a chance of escape."

"In Diz's death ray ship? You know that one crashed, right? Hard. It was pretty beat up and... on fire the last time I saw it. You really think that's your best bet?"

"It's our only bet," Diz answered quietly. "Scans say it's online. If it is at the facility then, regardless of condition, I will likely be able to repair it enough with the equipment we stored on Earth to get us back in to space."

Phil contemplated the people before him. While the notion of them leaving earth was appealing, a vestigial part of him—something which may have been honour, may have been compassion—baulked at the idea of leaving the aliens to their own mismatched devices. It was unfortunately obvious that none of them were up to much and, while that might not have mattered if they were to simply summon a ship remotely, breaking into a guarded facility was a different matter entirely. Phil didn't fancy their chances if they went at that alone—together, they could hardly endure a ten minute conversation, let alone a lengthy espionage.

In some ways, it made sense. For him, the argument that a particularly timely near-death experience had interrupted was seven years old. For the aliens, it was a fresh, gaping hole in whatever dynamic they had that, presumably, didn't ordinarily involve them nearly killing each other.

Then there was the issue of the unidentified 'other party'. Whatever nameless group had the ability to put the deadly Vizion agents on the run were not people Phil wanted near the earth. If their fight made its way to the surface... Phil imagined the damage the VIzion three had managed on their own and multiplied it a hundredfold. In his mind, forests flooded with blazing engine fuel and vanished into abstract sculptures of ash; seas crystallised, full of rainbows and and bits of bone; the entirety of humanity were reduced to dreamers, prisoners in nonsensical labyrinths studied by cold-eyed oddities. An army would spell the end of all life on Earth.

(And, underneath all that, there was something else, something insistent like an eager little dog trying to dodge about his legs and out the door. He wanted to know. Once upon a time, the whole world had hinged upon him and, though the prospect of such pressure was unbearable... so was the thought of abandoning his part in everything.)

"So, when do we leave?"

The three froze in their own, individual fashions: Viz like a twist of blackened metal; Diz cold and cruel as a glass skull; Quiz like something hunted.

"'We'?" Viz's whipcrack voice snapped over Phil's head.

"What, you really thought I'd just let you waltz off into the abyss? Nah. I'm coming with you to Zone 5.1. You can drop me back here before you sod off back in to space." He pretended to examine his nails, his heart quick beneath his shirt. "Think of it as me very graciously showing you the door before the cops arrive. Besides, I remember the place pretty well, which means I'm already doing better than Diz."

Viz pursed his scarred lips in consideration. Phil could feel Quiz's strange, soft eyes monitor his every move.

"Very well. I suppose you're cannon fodder, if nothing else." Viz regarded Phil for a second longer before spitting a curse in garbled Not-English and sweeping from the room. "Diz, Quiz; we need to pinpoint the ship's new location. Bring that damned radio system."

Almost immediately, the other two followed, a definitive direction restoring a sense of urgency and purpose that had been lost in the crash. A green-skinned hand snuck back in to the room and flicked the light switch off.

The 'almost' of the equation was Quiz, who took a second to brush past Phil before departing. The small act of secrecy was performed awkwardly, clumsily, and would have been noted immediately had the other two aliens not already left and the room not been dark.

Phil felt a rectangular weight drop into the pocket of his hoodie.

A careful finger found clean, metallic lines and a series of regular indents. When he was certain he was alone, he slipped the whatever-it-was free of the confines of his jacket and stared at it in the dim light coming from the hallway. It was familiar, and knowing what it was but not why it had been given made the whole night seem suddenly stranger.

It was Quiz's remote to the ship.

Whatever game he had just involved himself in was, he realised, disturbingly intricate; he was playing chess in the dark with the trump card of an ace up his sleeve.