Anna lay awake in her room. She stared up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head and listened to the old oak tree sway with the wind just outside her window—a hushed sound that ebbed and flowed like waves. The moon, a bright disc, peeked through the unfurling curtains.
Although she was bone-weary and it was past midnight, she couldn’t sleep. She rolled over in bed and was reminded with a fresh jolt of pain of the doughnut-size bruise on her butt. Her knees and palms throbbed from where she had bounced off gravel like a rubber ball.
Hours had passed since she had encountered the creature, but she could still feel its fingers pressed against the sides of her head. Not a phantom sensation—it was something real, like a residue or a burn mark without the pain. The second it touched her temples, the creature had taken up residence in Anna’s mind. That was the only way she could explain it. She’d felt the creature see this world through her own eyes and listen through her ears. Shared sensations.
And in turn, Anna had sensed what the creature was feeling: Frightened and disoriented. Tired and hungry, not just for food but for connection with its home and its family. She remembered the creature touching the sides of her head and how, just like that, the channel in Anna’s brain had flipped. New images had been projected onto her field of vision. She’d been flying through the cavernous warehouse but also standing on a distant shore looking out across the black emptiness of an alien sea. Two places experienced at once.
As she lay in bed, new images started to flood her field of vision again, as if her brain had just now been able to unpack all that it had experienced—a prolonged delay after pressing play.
In her vision, she stood motionless in ankle-deep water that was neither cold nor hot. Even now, Anna could feel the water lap against her legs in small waves. It felt real. Not imagined. A shared memory of the creature’s home world.
Black reeds waved in shallow tide pools, and stars reflected off the water’s surface. Green and blue lights, like the ones she had seen at the warehouse, floated just feet above the water in a slight breeze. The air smelled of salt. Just along the horizon hung a giant dust-red planet that took up almost half of the night sky. It looked like Jupiter with its big colored bands and spinning storms. But it wasn’t Jupiter. Anna was standing on a distant moon, orbiting a planet that no human had ever seen. An alien landscape. Shadow creatures moved nimbly across the sharp coastal rocks, their silhouettes a stark contrast to the brightness of the giant planet in the sky. She could feel the creatures’ presence. They approached from all sides, but there was no sense of danger. In fact, she felt just the opposite. The creatures were humming in unison—a beautiful sound—not quite a song or spoken language, but a way of communicating just the same.
The creature was trying to tell me something.
One of the shadow creatures suddenly appeared in front of Anna. It was taller than the others, and the feather-like scales around its head were adorned with pulsing green and blue lights. The creature pointed its long finger to a sheer cliff that towered high into the night sky behind her. Intersecting steps and pathways weaved their way to the top of the cliff, each lit by a different color light. At the very top of the cliff a flash of warm light caught Anna’s eye. A familiar light. A small orb spun in the sky and bent the light of the stars around it—the same doorway to another world she had seen just weeks before. The wormhole.
“Is that how you entered our world?” Anna asked out loud in her vision.
Suddenly, Anna felt herself being dragged through the wormhole. She looked down and saw the shadow’s hands where hers should be. A memory, but not hers. She was experiencing what the creature had experienced, seeing through its eyes. Just ahead she could make out a dim light as she was pulled through the wormhole, then she felt the rush of water around her. She was swimming now in a dark and cold body of water. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs itched. Then she broke through the surface and looked out across a site she knew so well. Tyson Lake. Somehow she was home under the familiar stars of her own world. Just in front of her was the small island that Scout had once said looked like a turtle shell.
This was it. The shadow was showing how it had entered this world. It was lost and disoriented and didn’t know its way back. But Anna did.
The wormhole we’ve been looking for all these months—it was in my backyard the entire time.
With a snap, Anna could feel her body pulled back to this reality, back to her bedroom. Disoriented, she shook her head and blinked her eyes, focusing on the shadows of leaves moving across the far wall. She took a deep breath and activated her iCom.
“Mara, are you awake?”
“I am. Is everything okay?” Mara answered.
“I think I may have figured it out. Meet me on the island in Tyson Lake in ten minutes. I’ll explain everything when I get there,” Anna said.