The morning came quietly.
At first, I did not know where I was.
This happens to men who have recently been arrested, attacked, rescued by a giant queen bee, carried through the night sky, introduced to a flower that could apparently hold conversations, and shown two baby bees surviving a storm in each other’s arms.
The mind requires a moment.
Mine required several.
I opened my eyes.
The hillside above Los Angeles was silver with dawn. The stream moved beside me, soft and bright, as if the world had been washed clean during the night.
For one impossible second, I believed everything might be all right.
Then I heard helicopters.
Not one.
Several.
They were far below us, moving through the morning haze above the city.
I sat up.
Elian stood at the edge of the hill, looking down at Los Angeles.
She had not been sleeping.
I doubted she had slept at all.
Her wings were folded behind her. In the early light they shimmered faintly, like glass that remembered the sun.
“They are searching,” she said.
“For us?”
“For something they cannot explain.”
“That narrows it down in Los Angeles.”
She turned slightly toward me.
I was pleased to see she was beginning to understand when I was being serious and when I was simply trying not to collapse emotionally.
“They have seen traces,” she said.
“Traces?”
“Heat. Light. Displacement. Disturbances in the air. Your machines are primitive, but not useless.”
“That is almost exactly what my father said about me.”
Below us, the helicopters moved in slow, deliberate patterns.
They were not news helicopters.
They were not police helicopters.
They were the kind of helicopters that made citizens suddenly remember unpaid parking tickets, library fines, and unwise comments made in airports.
“How much did they see?” I asked.
Elian looked toward the city.
“Enough.”
That is one of the words people use when they do not wish to frighten you by using a larger number.
Across Los Angeles, thousands of cameras had been watching.
Traffic cameras.
Doorbell cameras.
Security cameras.
Dash cameras.
Phones held by people who were certain they had just recorded either the end of civilization or the greatest publicity stunt in Hollywood history.
Most of the footage would be dismissed.
Most strange things are.
A blur above Wilshire.
A flash over the Hollywood Hills.
A shadow crossing a freeway.
Two frames of something huge passing in front of the moon.
People would argue online.
People would enlarge the images.
People would accuse one another of being idiots.
This, I had learned, was the foundation of modern civilization.
But somewhere, somebody would not laugh.
In a government room without windows, large screens glowed in the half-dark.
Men and women sat at long tables with coffee, laptops, and the anxious faces of people who had not expected the universe to become interesting before lunch.
On one screen, Los Angeles appeared as a grid of lights and streets.
On another, a jagged line climbed sharply and vanished.
On a third, a video paused.
The image was blurred.
Almost useless.
Almost.
A young analyst leaned closer.
“Back it up two frames.”
The technician did.
The room grew quiet.
For the briefest instant, the screen showed something enormous moving above the city.
Not a plane.
Not a drone.
Not a weather balloon, unless weather balloons had developed wings, intelligence, and dramatic timing.
Someone said, “What the hell is that?”
No one answered.
A general standing at the back of the room removed his glasses.
That is rarely a good sign.
“Run it again,” he said.
They ran it again.
Then again.
Then slower.
Then enlarged.
Then sharpened.
The image remained impossible.
The room accepted this badly.
On the hillside, I watched the helicopters widen their search.
“What will they do if they find you?” I asked.
Elian did not answer at once.
The silence made my stomach tighten.
“Elian?”
She looked at me then.
For the first time, I saw fear in her face.
Not panic.
Not weakness.
Something older and deeper.
“Your species attempts to own what it does not understand,” she said.
“Not all of us.”
“No,” she said softly. “Not all.”
That should have comforted me.
It did not.
I looked down at my bare feet, my jail uniform, my bruised hands, and the dried blood on my chest.
I was not, in any meaningful sense, a warrior.
I had no weapons.
No plan.
No shoes.
And yet I felt something absurd rise inside me.
I wanted to protect her.
This was ridiculous.
She could lift me with one arm.
She could fly across the city faster than thought.
She could probably remove a tank from service by looking disappointed in it.
Still, I wanted to stand between her and whatever was coming.
Love, I was beginning to understand, is not always intelligent.
But it is often punctual.
“We should move,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
She looked toward the city again.
“Somewhere they will not think to look.”
“In Los Angeles, that could be a reasonably priced apartment.”
She almost smiled.
Almost.
Then her body changed.
Not visibly at first.
But the air around her seemed to gather itself.
The flowers bent toward her.
The stream trembled.
Her wings lifted.
Far below, one of the helicopters turned.
Then another.
Then another.
“They felt that,” she said.
“Felt what?”
“Me.”
In the windowless room, alarms began to sound.
Not loud alarms.
Not the kind that send people running through corridors.
These were polite government alarms.
The sort that beeped calmly while implying everyone might die.
A satellite image appeared on the central screen.
At first there was only hillside.
Brush.
Rock.
Morning light.
Then the image sharpened.
A figure stood near a stream.
Tall.
Winged.
Impossible.
Beside her stood a man in an orange jail uniform.
The room did not breathe.
The general put his glasses back on.
“Send it up,” he said.
“How high?” someone asked.
The general looked at the screen.
“All the way.”
On the hillside, Elian reached for me.
“Jed,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Hold tightly.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
Behind us, the flowers shivered.
Above us, the helicopters drew closer.
Below us, Los Angeles glittered as if it were innocent.
Then Elian sneezed.
It was not a delicate sneeze.
It was the kind of sneeze that caused birds to reconsider their location and three military satellites to briefly lose confidence in themselves.
Somewhere beneath the hills of Los Angeles, a giant queen bee sneezed.
And three nations immediately upgraded their threat assessments.