Professor Grey

The object didn't fall the way the movies said things fell from space. It didn't streak across the sky in a blaze of orange and white. There was no sonic boom, no cloud of smoke curling upward like a finger. It simply appeared — there — in the middle of Calloway Field, at the edge of town, on a Tuesday evening when the light was going that particular shade of amber that made everything look like an old photograph. Darius Mitchell saw it from his bedroom window. He was supposed to be doing algebra. His textbook was open on the desk, the worksheet half-filled with numbers he'd mostly guessed, and he was sitting sideways in his chair doing the thing he always did when math stopped making sense — looking out the window at Calloway Field. It was the size of a school bus. Maybe bigger. Shaped like something between a disk and a teardrop, with a surface that looked less like metal and more like the inside of an abalone shell — shifting, iridescent, as if it couldn't quite decide what color it wanted to be. Steam rose from the earth around it. Darius sat very still for what felt like a full minute. Then he picked up his phone and called Marcus. "You need to come to my window right now," he said, when Marcus picked up. "I'm eating—" "Marcus." Darius's voice came out flat and strange. "Come. To my window." Marcus must have heard something in it, because he was there in four minutes flat, still holding a half-eaten roll, breathing hard from running up the stairs. He stood beside Darius and looked out at Calloway Field. Neither of them said anything for a long time. "Is that—" Marcus started. "Yeah." "Are you sure?" "Marcus." "I'm just—" He swallowed. "I'm just asking." Below them, in the field, something moved. A seam appeared in the side of the object — not a door, exactly, not like anything with hinges or handles. More like the object was deciding to let something through. The shell-like surface parted the way water parts around a hand, slow and deliberate, and then — Then there was a figure in the gap. It was tall. Taller than any person Darius had ever seen. And it stood very still in the orange evening light, the way someone stands when they're trying to remember where they are, or when they've just realized something is wrong, or when they're afraid. Darius understood that last one. He was afraid too. But the strange thing — the thing he would think about later, lying awake in the dark — was that the figure didn't look dangerous. It didn't look like a conqueror or a weapon or any of the things from the movies. It looked, in that amber light, like something lost. Its head moved. Slowly. Scanning the treeline, the town, the distant lights beginning to flicker on as the evening darkened. And then — because the universe was either cruel or kind, Darius couldn't decide which — it looked up. Directly at the window. Directly at him. "Darius," Marcus whispered. "I see it." "What do we do?" Darius had no answer. The algebra worksheet sat untouched on the desk behind him. The number 47 was in the margin, circled, alone, leading nowhere. Outside, the figure raised one long hand. And Darius Mitchell, thirteen years old, algebra-hating, window-gazing Darius Mitchell, raised his hand back.