Chapter 1
Alice
One Month Later
My pager pings just as I settle into the scuffed plastic chair, the rich scent of coffee filling my nose. Out of instinct, I almost reach to snatch it off my belt until I remember there won’t be any urgent communication from the lab or exciting test results.
Because I’m not a PhD student at OrthCon University of Technology and Sciences any longer.
Punch the wrong guy, and everything disappears overnight, it turns out.
Doesn’t matter how incredible Professor Emilio Ranscuro thinks I am or how excited the Alien Biologies Department chairwoman is about my ideas.
It only matters that the Wallingfords can’t possibly send their baby boy to school with a girl who can (sort of) throw a punch.
I still find it annoying that no one wants to admit he fucking deserved it, but whatever.
My pager pings again, and I realize it’s probably just my parents, wanting to let me know they’ve safely arrived at their next destination.
For now, I ignore it, shaking the computer mouse awake.
The pad beneath it is peeling, the wrist pillow gummy with wear.
I wrinkle my nose and pull the mouse off the pad entirely, placing it on the fake wood table instead.
With a sigh, I plunk my backpack between my knees, digging past the eviction notice slips for a granola bar I swear I tossed in there a few weeks back and never ate.
Triumphant, I emerge from my quest with the bar in hand, though it’s more like loose granola in a plastic sleeve at this point.
Food is food, so I tear it open and begin to chew as I boot up the internet.
Even all these years after the Reformation, connecting still takes a few minutes—though part of that’s due to all the VPNs this internet café runs.
Out of habit, I heft my pockmarked, sticky-tabbed copy of The Joy of Cooking onto the table, rattling the mug and saucer of another customer a few computers down.
“Sorry,” I mouth when they glare in my direction.
I clear my throat and push the book away.
I don’t know why I brought it. I’m not going to look.
I promised myself I wouldn’t. Also, I promised the government, and there’s no way they weren’t made aware of my expulsion.
Can’t imagine another reason I’ve seen so many suits skulking around my apartment building.
I’m just here to email the bursar and get my tuition reimbursement.
That’s it. And I only came to the Halal Brothers’ Café because it’s close to my apartment and because I like Habib, the little orange cat.
Amir and Ali, the owners, are nice, too, though I can tell they hold me at arm’s length. Or, at least, they used to.
Back when I used to practically live here, before I started the program at OrthCon.
Before the suits at Sector came to say hello and basically told me I could go legit and channel all my “boundless passion” into a not-so-covertly government-funded research program at the city’s prestigious university…
or I could go to jail. And by jail, I’m pretty sure they meant a black site.
Stuff’s plenty different now after the Reformation, sure—but some things never really change.
“Haven’t seen you in a minute,” comes a voice at my elbow. So lost in my thoughts, I nearly jump out of my skin. Occupational hazard, I guess.
“Been busy with school,” I tell Amir, shoving The Joy of Cooking to the far side of the table so he can set my mug and saucer down. They don’t match—a hefty, plain cream-colored mug with a dainty, Persian-patterned saucer. I like it, though.
This place feels homier than the coffee shops sprouting up as the city gets back on its feet.
They’re all white walls and chrome, minimal black lettering, a lot of information about where the coffee comes from and what notes you’re supposed to be able to taste, but absolutely no soul.
All catering to the influx of graduate students into OrthCon, no doubt, after the program’s reopening a few years ago.
That’s the weirdest thing about the Reformation.
It’s been almost thirty years—basically my whole lifetime.
Will the history books assigned for some undergrad class a hundred years from now reflect just how long it really took for things to settle down?
To reach some sort of normalcy? Because shit was pretty fucked for a while there.
“Good to see you,” Amir replies. He turns to leave without any further conversation, the kind I’ve seen him launch into with other folks.
For a strained, weak moment, loneliness grasps at me with pleading hands.
I ignore it, shoving the feeling deep down, as I always do.
With a sigh, I pull the pager from the waistband of my jeans.
When my parents left for their world travels, they splurged on the fancy kind of beepers that allow short text messages.
Made it to Barcelona. Going to eat tapas by the sea now! Love, mom everything else was included in my program.
I planned to cover the costs of the folklore course with part of my stipend, but naturally the university is making me jump through a hundred hoops to get a refund for a class I’m not even taking.
Because expelling me wasn’t enough, apparently.
I lean back in my chair, causing Habib to give a squeak of annoyance. “Sorry, bud,” I murmur, reaching up to scratch his chin. Careful not to disturb him, I rub my eyes and start closing out of my tabs. I should go home. Sleep. Figure out what’s next.
My gaze falls on The Joy of Cooking. My fingers itch and my heart lurches. I chew on my lower lip, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jacket.
I can’t. Especially since I’ve been expelled. It’d be putting a target on my back. Making my shit situation even shittier.
“Doesn’t really seem like it can get that much worse, though,” I mutter.
The next second, I’m grabbing for the book like it’s the last loaf of bread in the supermarket back during the bad years.
With shaking fingers, I open to the right page, the spine so familiar with the exact spot that it falls open easily.
Then I’m frantically typing into the browser, pulling up the blog I haven’t looked at in nearly a year.
It’s still up, which I’m sort of surprised by—until I realize it’s probably a good way to root out other people like me.
My hands tremble as I click around to navigate to the post with the creme br?lée recipe, scrolling to the third image.
I click the word “joyful” in the caption’s photo.
When that takes me to an apple pie recipe, I check over my shoulder before scrolling to the second image in the blog post, clicking on “delightful” in the caption.
I follow that trail—the trail I designed, the one I have memorized by heart—until I reach the log-in page.
My fingers fly, the long, complicated passkeys still burned into my mind. When the back-end page loads, I pretend to stretch—to Habib’s outrage—while taking a look around the café. Should be in the clear. Historically, Sector isn’t great at blending in.
Electricity arcs through me when I see I have a message from love_cookies210 that’s gone unread for six months.
We’ve never exchanged real names, but we’ve traded plenty of other things—extremely sensitive information about our theories, our research, our movements.
I don’t trust a lot of folks—a side effect of growing up during the Reformation—but I almost trust Cookie. That’s saying a lot.
I click on their message, my entire body hunched around the hulking desktop, my heart in my throat. It takes a few minutes to decode using The Joy of Cooking—the cipher for my online conspiracy board.
Ever heard of Blackbird Hollow? Cookie’s message reads. Not too far from you. Some really, really weird activity. Leaf peepers disappear every autumn as far back as the records go. Someone else just went missing a few days ago. And guess what? You bet your ass it’s on a major ley line.
My heart is hammering in my chest, and I’m suddenly way too warm in my dad’s old duck-lined Carhartt jacket.
And there’s more, Blue. Lots of good intel about the Wild Hunt moving through there. You should go.
I bite down on my tongue as I reread the message over and over again, my eyes beginning to burn from the screen’s glow. A quick search shows that another couple just disappeared a few days ago. My blood absolutely thrums.
Because maybe I have my first real chance at proving that I’m right about the world. That everyone who laughed in my face was wrong. That my ex, who broke up with me when he found my stringboard of theories, is the real asshole, and also intellectually incurious as all hell.
“Blackbird Hollow,” I say out loud, and something about it feels right. Like I’m finally going to show everyone the supposed existence of aliens is nothing more than a cover-up for something way, way worse. That there’s a conspiracy so massive, even the government is hoodwinked.
We were stupid to think the otherworldly entities arrived from the vast void of space. No—non-human creatures were already here. In fact, they were here long before us, and something tells me they’ll be here long after we’re gone.
They’re called the Fair Folk, and I’m going to be the one who tells everyone the truth about them.