She settled into the right seat. “How was your weekend?”
“Good. Amelia’s birthday was yesterday. I’m still coming down from all the sugar.”
Carrera laughed, but her mirth hid a strange disquiet. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something felt wrong, like déjà vu but different. She knew that Norris’ had been looking forward to his daughter’s party almost as much as he had been dreading having to interact with the eight-, now nine-year-old girl’s mother — his ex-wife. Nothing strange about that.
So why do I feel like I stepped into the wrong scene in a movie?
She wondered, for a fleeting instant, if she was dreaming but the moment passed as quickly as it had come and she dismissed her reaction.
Yet, as they worked through the pre-flight checklist, exchanging idle banter, the feeling kept coming back intermittently, like the flicker of a fluorescent light bulb about to die. Eventually, Norris took note.
“Are you feeling okay, Jeanne?”
There it is again. What the hell is going on? She managed a wan smile and a shrug. “Yeah. Just…weird.”
The captain straightened in his seat, his expression instantly serious. “What’s weird?”
“It’s nothing. Just a little spooked.”
“A little spooked isn’t nothing. Your subconscious might be picking up on something that your conscious mind is missing.”
She laughed, though it was an uncomfortable sound. “Since when did you become so superstitious?”
Even as she said it, she realized that the source of the strange feeling was Norris himself.
Amelia’s birthday.
Norris never called his daughter by her given name. Whenever he spoke of her, he almost always said, “my little girl” or sometimes “my daughter.” When he called her by name, which was rare, he always used the pet name “Mellie.” But today, he had called her “Amelia.”
Despite the still-unexplained incongruity, Carrera felt an odd sense of relief. Simply knowing what it was that felt out of place had eased her concerns. She felt as if a bothersome sliver had finally been tweezed out of her subconscious.
“It’s nothing,” she reiterated, and this time she meant it. Maybe the birthday girl had scolded him about his refusal to use her proper name. Carrera could remember when she had demanded that her own parents cease and desist from using nicknames. I was probably about the same age as Amelia.
“You’re sure?” Norris pressed. “Four hundred and twenty-two people are about to put their lives in our hands, so if for any reason you don’t want to fly, you need to let me know.”
“Seth, it’s fine. I’m good.” And she was, even though she didn’t know why Norris had started referring to his daughter in a different way, or why he had shown up early when he almost never did, or why he was suddenly insisting that she pay attention to her intuition when she had never known him to do that….
Even though there was no explanation for any of those things, the satisfaction of having figured it out was enough to put her mind at ease.
Mostly.
They concluded the pre-flight checks and finished boarding, and as Norris greeted the passengers and briefed them on the itinerary for the trans-Pacific flight, Carrera made the final preparations for take-off. As she watched him work and listened to his voice on the public address system, she found herself scrutinizing everything he did, every minor perceived deviation from his normal routine. She could not tell if he was acting differently, or if she was merely being hypersensitive, but from a technical standpoint, his flying was spot on.
About two hours after take-off, Norris handed the controls over to Carrera and rose from his chair to stretch his legs. There was nothing unusual about this. Flying, particularly on a long trans-oceanic route, was mostly a struggle against tedium. There was very little for the pilot to do aside from remaining vigilant and ready to respond to the unexpected, which could mean anything from steering around pockets of turbulence to coping with mechanical or electrical failures. Carrera focused her attention on the instrument panel while Norris stepped into the lavatory.
Although her initial discomfort had long since passed, Carrera continued to be plagued by the surreal sense of dislocation she had experienced before take-off. She could not shake the feeling that she was actually asleep and dreaming everything. The phenomena was so persistent that she felt compelled to test the reality of her circumstances by checking to see if the printed weather report made sense. She had heard that, in dreams, written text often changed or was illegible, but the weather reports were completely normal. She was not dreaming then, but she definitely felt like she was in the Twilight Zone.
“Still spooked?” Norris asked from behind her.
“Is it that obvious?” She smiled without looking back and quickly added. “Not spooked exactly, just feeling a bit…odd.”
“If I may ask, when did it start?”
Carrera craned her head around to look at him. Norris was standing just behind her, his arms crossed over his chest. The pose was all wrong; he never stood like that. Or did he? She shook her head. “Honestly, it was when you called your daughter ‘Amelia.’”
“Ah. And that’s not something I usually do.” Norris said it more like a statement than a question. He tilted his head back as if embarrassed by the mistake. “Well, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.”
Carrera’s forehead creased in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Norris smiled and then moved with the speed of striking viper. Carrera did not even have time to yelp in alarm. The captain clapped his left hand over her mouth, stifling any potential cry for assistance. His right drove something into the side of her neck.
Carrera felt a sharp twinge, like a bee sting, followed by a bloom of icy cold radiating away from the spot. She caught a glimpse of a discarded syringe falling to the carpeted floor, and then his right arm snaked around to immobilize her. She tried to struggle out of his grasp, but whatever he had injected into her neck was already having an effect. Her muscles felt leaden. Even breathing was an ordeal.
She gasped a word, a single question that was muffled by the hand still clamped over her mouth. Why?
Norris however seemed to understand. As darkness closed in from the edges of her vision, Carrera thought she heard him say, “Not for you.”
PART ONE — SKULLS
ONE
“Aliens!”
The familiar refrain echoed across the open stretch of sand, setting Jade Ihara’s teeth on edge. “I swear to God,” she muttered, “if he says that one more time, I’m going to personally start an intergalactic war.”
Beside her, Pete “Professor” Chapman chuckled. “Careful, now. Don’t get caught on camera biting the hand that feeds.”
“Easy for you to say,” Jade retorted. “You’re not the one watching your career slowly circling the drain. I can’t believe I ever thought this was a good idea.”
Nevertheless, she stopped and glanced around to make sure that their conversation was not being captured on video. They were already a hundred yards away from the squat museum complex — Jade thought it looked more like a police station or a military base than a repository of ancient culture — which seemed to be the focus of attention for the camera crew, but she knew Professor’s admonition was warranted. With modern technology, it was sometimes hard to tell when the cameras were rolling. While the crew of Alien Explorers—a cable television documentary program with a penchant for making elaborate connections between ancient civilizations and little green men — did most of their work with state-of-art video and audio production equipment, she knew they also liked to sometimes fold in candid footage shot with handheld digital video cameras and even smart phones, which in the final edit, gave the finished product a sort of gritty verisimilitude.