The phone rings.

Andi puts down her drumsticks and picks up. "Hello?"

"Robin's going to be late," says Ethan. "She's only just getting out of bed."

"Oh. Thanks for letting me know. How come she slept so late?"

"She had an—interesting night. You'll be hearing all about it in an hour."

"...Okay. An hour, sure."

"She'll see you then," says Ethan, and he hangs up.

Andi tap-taps a little more, then goes and writes algebra flashcards, and then plays Tetris till she loses, and then tries to duplicate the Tetris theme song on the drums recognizably.

After the indicated hour has elapsed: doorbell!

Door!

"Holy hell what happened to you? Yeah it's fine come in come in what happened?"

"Beginning sounds good yeah - do you need me to call the police?"

"No," says Ethan, a little sharply.

"I know exactly how it sounds," she nearly growls. "It sounds that way to me and I was bloody there. But it happened, all right?"

"And there weren't - like - cameras - or anything?"

"There were no cameras," she says. "You couldn't have faked that - creature, anyway, he wasn't a man in a bloody rubber suit, he was the real thing. You'd understand if you'd seen the way he moved. Anyway, I froze up and he turned around and looked right at me, but I was just barely peering around the corner and I guess he didn't see me there. He had something in his hand. Whatever he flashed the running man with, I guess. Then he went back in the shop and I bolted. That's where I got the scrapes - I fell down on the way home. Nothing chasing me, I just..." She shrugs helplessly.

"Join the club," says Robin, hugging herself.

Ethan puts his arm around her shoulders.

Andi wedges herself into the hug too.

Robin clings to both of them.

"Did you get a good look at the guy?" wonders Andi.

"The one who...?" She shakes her head. "No. He was wearing a jacket... I think he had dark hair, not very long or anything... the jacket was red. Dark trousers, too. I never saw his face properly."

"So if he turns up missing and his face is in the paper you can't be sure it's the same guy," sighs Andi. "...Can I go get Bella?"

"...Yeah," says Robin. "Sure. Yeah."

Andi goes. She gets Bella.

Bella follows her into the living room. "You saw some kind of monster and you are very sure it was not a guy in a costume?"

"Very sure," she says. "Incredibly sure. You couldn't have fit a human into that shape. And all his parts moved. He had this great big long tail and you could see how he used it for balance, he'd go one way and it'd go the other, and the feet - he had these massive bird feet. Talons. When he was looking around he sort of - grabbed the pavement with his toes."

"In the interest of completeness - you weren't on anything, more than twenty-four hours' worth of sleep-deprived, suffering from a head injury...?"

She shakes her head. "I was up late, but I slept all right the night before."

"And this is not a charming prank, a test of the extent of anyone's credulity, etcetera?"

"Would you or would you not be asking me the same thing if Andi had told you that I were reporting this experience?"

"No! I wouldn't!"

Ethan hugs Robin some more.

"That's very generous of you," says Bella, looking surprised.

"It'd be one hell of a prank," she says. "Believe me, I couldn't act this shook up if I tried."

"Okay. So - you saw some kind of creature, maybe a really unprecedented special effect but maybe a mutant or a monster or an alien of some kind. This was an otherwise deserted street, no cameras - no obvious reason to be busting out the Muppets or the holograms - Did the guy or the monster say anything?"

"Yeah," she says, "the monster - well, he made noise. I got the sense there were words, but I couldn't hear him well enough to make them out. If they were even in English."

"The human said nothing, though? Where was this?"

She shakes her head and names a street intersection.

"So if one of us goes there - broken door on the shop - would you expect an ash pile or any smears where the guy got vaporized?"

She hesitates, then shakes her head again. "No. I don't know. It didn't look like anything - fell, after. He was just gone."

"Did the monster talons leave marks on the sidewalk?"

"I'm not sure. They might have. Not big ones, anyway, not that I could see from where I was standing."

"What kind of shop is this?"

She shrugs. "It was closed, lights off and everything, they all were. I didn't turn back to look at the sign."

"I don't... I don't think so," she says.

"Do you know what time this happened? Can you go into more detail about what the alien sounded like? Or the weapon - what it looked or sounded like?"

"It was made of shiny metal," she recalls, "and it tapered almost to a point but sort of blunt, and it made a sound like - like a screamy whoosh. And there was a smell after it fired. Kind of a burning smell but not quite. The monster's voice was very deep and kind of growly, but it didn't sound like an animal, it sounded like an angry man muttering to himself. Except the sounds weren't quite right. I've no idea if he even could speak any human language, with that mouth. And it was, I don't know, a little after midnight."

"The hell would I do that for? I didn't even go home, I went straight to Ethan's."

"Whose parents are likewise in complete ignorance, I assume?"

"Yeah, of course."

"If Charlie were - but he isn't. And I don't see Renée being very useful here either. I suppose we could tell Trouble."

Robin considers this notion.

"No harm in it," says Ethan. "...Probably."

"Well, I don't know what use he'd be, but one thing I definitely don't expect is for him to decide unauthorized that the situation would be better if forty more people knew about it."

"Yeah, you've got that dead right," Ethan agrees.

"And then he'll know to - I don't know. Avoid that intersection at night? Go looking for that intersection at night? I actually don't know, maybe we'd better not tell him."

"There is that."

"We can tell him, though," says Robin, "if we think of a way it would help. Help what, I don't even know. I just saw some stranger murdered by a, a demon. What's going to help with that?"

"Unless you want to risk explaining to a therapist, I don't really know."

She shudders. "No, thank you."

"Didn't think so. Do you want some meringues? Trouble made, like, ninety of them, there are still most of them around."

She perks up a little. "Don't mind if I do."

Bella goes and gets meringues. She puts them down in the middle of the group.

Robin eats meringues. They seem to be very helpful to her mental state.

Ethan has some, too, occasionally sneaking one right out of Robin's hand while she's not looking.

Bella eats one. She makes incomprehensible notes.

Andi eats meringues and pats Robin on the shoulder occasionally.

"What are you scribbling about?" inquires Ethan.

"The monster. Alien, demon, whatever. Thinking of things it could be and whether there are ways to find out that are relatively safe."

"Any luck?"

"Not really."

"Didn't think so."

"Yeah, I haven't had to figure out anything like this before."

"I bloody hope not," he says dryly.

"No kidding. But - Robin, did this thing look to you like a species? Well-adapted for something, good at moving around, not - sick, asymmetrical?"

"It - no, yeah," she says, making a gesture that combines a nod and a shake of the head into an ambiguous wobble. "Whatever it was, it was definitely one of it. It worked."

"If it is, so to speak, one of it," says Bella, "then there are certainly more of it - even if they're dead, far away, or - hiding."

...Robin contemplates this idea.

Ethan hugs her.

"This one was careless enough to let Robin see it, but it and however many conspecifics it has have been discreet," says Bella, tapping her pen on her notebook. "On at least one occasion at least one - demon? we can call them that till further notice - has interacted with at least one human; it was not friendly. We can't be sure if the one demon or the one human or the one interaction is typical, especially since if it were very common more people would be going missing - although I'd want to look at statistics to be more sure that they aren't - and more doors would be broken and someone less circumspect about adults than Robin would have spotted one. Although I wonder if there's a way to cruise through a psych ward to be more sure they haven't. Robin, can you draw - or direct Andi to draw - the demon?"

"I'm not much of an artist," she says. "But I'll describe it again if you want." She smiles wryly. "Like a police sketch."

"I'll see what I can do, lemme go get some paper," says Andi. She fetches a clipboard and a sheet of paper and a pencil and does her best to render the demon according to Robin's description.

"Draw some random other monsters, keep the drawings together in a stack," says Bella, "I'm probably being paranoid, but these things didn't exactly land on the White House lawn to announce they came in peace."

Robin describes it as exactingly as she can. Long neck, long bladed tail, horns, claws, beak, plenty of miscellaneous sharp parts.

Bella peers at the drawing, writes a few notes about it in her own notebook.

Andi finishes touching up the demon, then gets more paper and draws fanciful other creatures to keep with it for camouflage. Spherical fluffy bird with eight legs, low-slung turtle-sloth hybrid with long droopy whiskers, six-headed dragon, scary unicorn with fangs and bat wings, butterfly-winged fairy with enormous compound eyes and four arms and fluffy antennae.

"That one's cute," says Robin, of the flufferfly.

"Thanks."

"If you had to bet," says Bella to Robin, "would you put your money on science fiction, or fantasy, here?"

"That was my bet too from the way it sounded," nods Bella, "but you're the one who saw it. And if there are lots of it, if it's one of it, this isn't a mutant or an isolated science experiment - they could still be designed, but it'd be a big project, hard to hide, time-consuming, and it would mean getting a lot of groundwork science done under the radar, I'm assigning that low probability -" She scratches symbols in her notebook. "Which leaves some class of thing that sci fi has not adequately prepared us for, or aliens."

"Alien demon," she says, and sighs, and rubs her forehead, and cuddles into Ethan.

"Aliens could have all kinds of interesting tech - and that's another kind of designed they could be, easy to hide your science fair project if you do it in space, that guy is spiky enough I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were ordered up for custom ambulatory Cuisinart needs - but if this one crashed through a door, I'm betting they don't have personal teleportation. They could still have extremely fancy ways of crossing interstellar distances, or this one could be stupid or forgetful or its tech could be broken, but probably they cannot teleport. They probably also don't have personal invisibility cloaks - that doesn't rule out invisible ships, and there's still the stupid/forgetful/broken possibility, but that's two things that it would be bad for hostile aliens to have that they probably do not have."

"Well, that's... nice," says Robin. "Lord. Hostile aliens."

"It's also not strictly ruled out that they are friendly, neutral, divided amongst themselves, etcetera," says Bella. "And that the human was doing something bad or this was a bad example of an alien."

"Right," says Robin. "Now if only we had a way to check."

"Unless the store has only recently become a front for alien activity, they probably maintain normal operations during the day," says Bella. "If any of us has an excuse to go to that kind of store, we can look for out of place things, there. I'm not that keen on the idea, but more information is better."

"I'll take a look," offers Ethan.

"Okay, good. And if it's something like, I don't know, a tire shop, a liquor store, someplace we can't reasonably be, we're somewhat out of luck, but most stores are places where fifteen-year-olds may appear without too much suspicion."

He nods agreement.

"Robin, can we get you anything besides meringues?"

Andi gets up, goes to the kitchen, and peers into the tea cupboard. "Peach, raspberry mint, white with cinnamon, chanomile?" she calls.

"White with cinnamon," Robin decides. "Thanks. You're a star."

"No problem." Andi puts a glass of water in the microwave and leans on the threshold. "Bella, if we figure out what's going on what happens next?"

"If we could know that before finding out what's going on," Bella says, "there would be no point to the finding out."

Robin snorts.

"If they're friendly and doing a bad job at it, or friendly and doing the best they can but it's not very good, then it's relatively straightforward, for contact with an alien species. If some of them are friendlier than others - depends on the exact politics of the situation, I guess. If they're all unfriendly then - documentation, lots of it, and finding some sort of trustworthy authority with more firepower than four teenagers."

She nods slowly.

"Do you guys own cameras with instant-developing film? Me and Andi have one between us. I might be able to figure out how to muffle the noise it makes. The kind that require developing is better than nothing, but we don't know how many aliens there are or whether their interactions with humans might tend to be more diplomatic. Digital is also better than nothing but it'd be harder to demonstrate that the photos were untampered with."

"I can get my hands on a digital," says Ethan.

"And it won't be confiscated back by your parents?"

"Not bloody likely; I borrowed it six months ago and it's been sitting in the back of a drawer ever since."

"Ah, all right then. Robin?"

She shakes her head.

"Okay. We don't yet know that documentation should be the done thing, but if you see an opportunity to grab one do. The ideal would actually be one that could take video."

"I'll keep it in mind."

"And of course this only applies if there are theoretically circumstances in which you're willing to poke around potentially hostile aliens' lairs. It's possible I shouldn't make runs in person at all just because I'll trip over something and get attention while attempting to be stealthy."

"...Theoretically," she says, recalling the demon with a wince. "Very, very theoretically."

"Can you tell us under what circumstances?"

"Well... if there's no one else for the job, and it needs to be done..." She shrugs.

Ethan squeezes her shoulder. "Let me do the skulking," he advises.

"You are designated skulker, congratulations."

He laughs.

"So, this isn't looking like a music day, huh," observes Andi.

"Not so much." Robin grins wryly. "Sorry."

"It's okay," says Andi. She remembers the tea, goes and nukes the water an extra thirty seconds to get it hot again, and drops in a teabag and brings it out to steep.

"Thanks," sighs Robin, cuddling the cup.

Ethan hugs her.

Andi does too.

"Ooh. A fascinating thing," says Bella. "Let's see. Renée is meeting friends for dinner, so we're fending for ourselves, but Trouble might decide to appear with baked goods."

"For the purposes of this discussion, Trouble is very private," says Ethan. "I'll see you after school, then? When?"

"Six, if you don't need a ride, earlier with some loitering beforehand if you do."

Bella would like to know in advance if Trouble is liable to appear with baked goods. So she sits with him at lunch.

"Hi, Bella!"

"Hi, Trouble! If it should happen that you come over for dinner tonight no one will make you eat your vegetables."

"Ooh, I'm sold," he says, grinning.

"Also Ethan and probably Robin will be over."

"How 'bout that. I'll make sure to bring enough cake for everybody."

"Mmm, cake."

"So much cake," he promises.

"Awesome. So how've you been?"

"I have been awesome! I'd tell you the details, but you don't want 'em."

"I will take your word on that."

He laughs. "Because you know me."

"I do."

"You do," he sighs, hugging himself contentedly.

"Why is that sighworthy?"

"I like that you know me," he says. "And, you know, aren't running for the hills."

"Well, I did suggest that maybe we shouldn't have you over to set off fireworks, but the hills seem uncalled for."

"I just didn't want to find out experimentally how you and firework safety mix. Especially when it's my mom setting out the rules."

"Mm, yeah," he says, conceding the point. "Me, rules, and explosives is a bad mix."

"See," Bella says, "I know you."

"Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww."

Bella bursts into helpless giggles.

Trouble beams at her.

The rest of the school day elapses. Bella cooks - spaghetti, easy to make enough for a crowd.

Trouble shows up first, with cake.

"Hey you. You are the first to arrive."

"I feel so special," he laughs.

"Aren't you just. Plunk that down on the counter?"

And then Ethan turns up, with Robin.

"Hi guys! You are here just in time, Bella is saucing the pasta. Come on in."

"Saucy," remarks Ethan. In they go.

"Pff."

Bella is indeed saucing the pasta. She serves herself a plateful and passes the utensil to Trouble next. "So, Ethan, will the fascinating thing make sense to Trouble without context, or should I go get my notes and start from the beginning?"

"It's a used bookstore owned by a member of The Sharing," says Ethan.

"...What is?"

"Go ahead and get your notes."

"...Shit," says Trouble, gazing at the sketch.

"Yes." Bella lets him have a good long stare at the alien, then tucks it between the eight-legged bird and the fairy. "Do you want me to reconstruct the reasoning that led to 'aliens' and whatnot?"

"Sure."

Bella reconstructs said reasoning. "Other options," she concludes, "are not off the table, but alien seems most likely."

"Gotcha," says Trouble. "Well. Fuck."

"That about sums it up," says Ethan, helping himself to some spaghetti.

"So this could be a coincidence, but does this look to the rest of you like the Sharing might be alien-oriented in some way?"

"Definitely seems fishy to me," says Ethan.

Robin nods.

"Does... that... mean that Dad is a Pod Person?"

"Oh, Lord," mutters Robin.

"Having thoughts, or just - discomforts, Robin?"

"Discomforts. By the bucketload," she says.

"Trouble, you never got around to poking the Sharing with a stick, did you?"

He shakes his head. "Never did."

"Does this information make it likely that you will decide to?"

He glances at the last known location of Andi's sketch and quirks a wry smile. "Maybe."

"For whatever reason, the Sharing Aliens aren't public and may have pod-person capabilities, I would be very gratified if from this point on none of us made a move without checking in with at least one other of us."

"...What's a pod person?"

"It's a movie reference, but the general idea is that they can convincingly replace - or maybe possess or mind-control or something - people. Such as possibly Charlie."

"Mind control." He shivers. "Second thought, maybe I won't go. No matter how much I wanna give that alien a hug."

"I doubt they can do it indiscriminately. And this is if they can do it at all, which is not guaranteed - it just explains Charlie way too neatly. They're probably limited in resources, or maybe range-limited so they have to balance inconspicuousness with collecting people to - pod. Which would be a damn good reason to have a The Sharing, wouldn't it."

"Creeeeepy," says Trouble, shivering again.

"The Sharing could also just be an alien-allied cult, we can't lean on any of these guesses," says Bella, scribbling furiously. "Or the owner of this particular bookstore could be connected to both things independently - or could be an innocent, albeit Sharing-affiliated, dupe, whose store is being used unbeknownst - we'd need more data to know. Besides, Ethan, your parents are acting the same, right?"

"Yeah," says Ethan, "but acting the same means they don't bloody talk to me, they could be recruiting everyyone they pass on the street and I wouldn't have a clue. About the only way I'd know if they'd been replaced by alien clones is if they started taking an interest in my life."

"Do you think our real dad is dead or something?" whispers Andi.

"Tech industry," says Ethan. "Dad's a programmer; Mum's an engineer."

Trouble shakes his head.

"And a bookstore owner. Okay, maybe they aren't being selective, or very selective - that still means we can't necessarily assume politicians or law enforcement or whatever are alien-free."

"No kidding," says Trouble.

"Or Sharing members are not pod people at all. Or one of the key observations is mistaken or incomplete. God damn."

"The pod people explain that media footprint so well, though," says Ethan. "I mean, brainwashing only goes so far."

"Yes. It explains that too. I don't think there are any observations we have made that alien pod people can't explain."

"Now that's not something you hear every day," says Trouble.

Trouble shrugs and eats with no noticeable hesitation.

Robin prods hers unhappily with her fork.

Ethan, his plate already empty, steals openly from Robin's.

She laughs softly, kicks him, and digs in.

"There's enough for you to have seconds, Ethan," snorts Andi, eating subduedly but efficiently.

Robin takes her share almost before he puts down his plate.

Andi giggles, a little.

Robin smiles triumphantly.

"Yeah, sounds good."

"I think that's my exit cue," says Ethan. He grins at Trouble.

Trouble grins back.

Robin laughs. "Don't even think it, lads."

"Do I want to know?"

"You wanna grill me about Reggie? Go ahead," he says. "He's basically a professional rich person."

"...Professional rich person? Old money?"

"Yeah. You know, if you start out with a big enough pile you can live pretty well just on what it sweats while it's sitting there."

"I know that. Just confirming that it was inherited and he wasn't, like, an early retiree from a startup or something."

"Yeah, nope," says Trouble. "I mean, he does stuff. I don't really pay attention. But I wouldn't say he has a job."

"Has his behavior changed since he joined up with the Sharing?"

"Yeah," says Trouble. "Like, he started putting me in the hospital a lot more often."

"...That is a weird change for a pod person to make. Can you be - er, as much more specific as you think I mean when I say that?"

He laughs softly. "Yeah. It's like... it's like most of the time, he barely notices me, and then when it's time to play he's on me like a starving dog. It wasn't that way at all, before. Used to be more - even. Now it's like he's got a couple hours here and there and the rest of the time God is looking over his shoulder and he has to act like nothing's up."

Bella shudders.

"You okay?"

"I'm worried about you."

He grins. "Aww."

"I'm trying to figure out if this is evidence for or against the pod person theory."

"It does kind of seem like... I don't know. Like he's someone else, most of the time, and every so often he pops the cork and lets out the old Reggie."

"And this dates to when relative to when he started membership in the Sharing?"

"Yeah. Like, I don't know exactly when he signed up, but it was about the same time."

"Who does he seem like when he's being someone else?"

"Like he kind of doesn't give a shit about anything in the house, he's just there killing time and pretending to be Reggie until he can get back to what matters," says Trouble. "Reggie was never like that. I mean, you know, he didn't have great interests, but he had interests. I figured... I don't know what the hell I figured. But it makes too much sense now that I've thought of it. There's Reggie and then there's Fake Reggie."

"And what matters is - not transparent to you, whatever it is?"

"Nah. Something he goes off and does, or something he's waiting for that hasn't happened yet - I just know it's not something he has or does around the house."

Write write write.

"You getting anything out of this?"

"I need to know more. I'm sure someone smarter than me could come up with all kinds of results just from what I have, but I am not smarter than me."

Trouble shrugs. "What do you have? Anything I don't know about yet?"

Bella flips through her notes, goes over all the facts again. Robin saw and heard these things, described them this way. Ethan found this fact which may connect the sighting and the Sharing, it dovetails with this behavior of Charlie's - and now that behavior of Reggie's - but Ethan's own parents are displaying nothing out of the limited ordinary. She reconstructs her reasoning about aliens versus demons or domestic science projects, and what tech they probably don't have.

"If they do replace people, I'd be more surprised if Ethan noticed anything from his parents," says Trouble. "Because they replace them pretty well, right? Reggie didn't come home from a meeting and turn nice, your dad didn't start acting like a totally different person. And faking Ethan's parents to Ethan is a cinch, you'd have to be seriously clueless to fuck it up. Nah, if you wanna know if Ethan's parents are pod people, you should find out from somebody who actually knows them. A coworker or something."

Bella nods, and writes this down.

"That's about the only bright idea I've got. But I don't know what it would even prove."

"It'd be evidence, if we could get it without tipping off said parents. If they have co-workers who aren't in the Sharing themselves."

"Yeah, but evidence for what? About what? Maybe we shouldn't even bother looking at Ethan's parents," he says. "Maybe we should start finding other members and seeing if they're pod people. Whoever we can find out about without tipping off the brain-eating alien cult. There, I had another bright idea."

"It's harder to know who to ask, in the case of strangers," says Bella. "I mean, it's a good idea, but I don't know how to implement it without a list of specific potential pod people."

"How'd Ethan find out the bookstore owner was a member? There's your list," says Trouble.

"But of course I forgot to ask him. I guess there's tomorrow. We don't have nearly enough resources for individual days to make a difference in what we can and can't accomplish."

Trouble shrugs. "Yeah. And, you know, whatever these people are doing, they're not blowing anything up or conquering anybody. At least not so's you notice. Maybe they don't have that many resources, either. Maybe pod people and zappers are their only tricks."

"Pod people, zappers, however they're hiding when they're monster-shaped, and, if they are aliens after all, however they got here," clarifies Bella. "That's the realistic minimum - they could theoretically be here by accident and not have that mechanism under control, crash landing or surprise portal or something - and the hiding could be by relatively mundane mechanisms, but still."

"What I wanna know," muses Trouble, "is how our razor-studded friend got into the closed bookstore around midnight before he chased that other dude out."

"Pod people can turn into monsters and that one so chose for some reason even though he wound up using a ranged weapon, there's a secret passage or compartment or something to a monster hideout, they can teleport but under relatively limited circumstances, it sprouted there overnight - hideout requires the fewest extra assumptions, but it could be any of those."

"Next question's why either of them was there," says Trouble. "I'd almost say it has to be hideout. Otherwise you have to explain what else they were doing there and how it went so badly south that Mister Pointy ran out on the street to zap the guy. And he went back in afterward, too, didn't he? To do what? Crawl back into his hole, I bet. Or I guess he could've been going to get chewed out by his boss first - but then why was the boss in there?"

"Hideout seems like the best explanation. This is a long, long chain of inferences, though, and any link in it could be broken - not enough data."

"Right," says Trouble. "And I'd poke my head in and look for secret tunnels if all I had to worry about was getting vaporized by trigger-happy demons, but then there's the part where they maybe have mind control."

"I'm so with you. On the mind control not being an acceptable risk, not on the willingness to get vaporized." She swallows.

"Yeah, not a lot of people are with me on that one."

"Me too," says Trouble. "I'd say I hope Reggie's not, but I already get him back plenty often, so it's not like I can imagine he's dead or anything."

Bella shivers again.

Trouble shrugs.

The door opens, and in comes Renée. She pokes her head into the living room. "Hi, Trouble. Staying the night again?"

"Yep," says Trouble.

"All right. Bella, did you do all right for dinner?"

"Spaghetti," shrugs Bella. "Robin and Ethan were over too but they're gone now."

"Ooh, dinner for five. Is there dessert left?"

"Yeah, we didn't eat the entire cake."

"It's really great cake," brags Trouble. "You should have some!"

"Don't mind if I do," chuckles Renée, and off she goes.