William raised his fingers to his lips, a child’s Be quiet! And Abby stifled an urge to cry out.
“Don’t be afraid,” the boy whispered.
But of course she was afraid. She saw the broken cocoon on the faded bedspread. It was an insect thing. Abby had never liked insects. Her older brothers used to torment her with caterpillars. The cocoon on the bed implied that this creature was a kind of human bug, and the idea was so distasteful that Abby wanted to flee the room or call out for help.
William appeared to sense her distress. “Abby,” he said—it was the first time William had called her by her given name, as if he were an adult—“this is Rosa Connor. She can’t speak. But she won’t hurt you. All she wants to do is leave. She’s fragile, and I’m afraid she’ll get hurt if the others find her here. Abby, do you understand?”
Of course she did not. How could one understand such things?
But she recognized the sincerity in William’s voice. He was an odd child, Abby thought dizzily. Abby knew children. She had raised a daughter of her own and had been raising her daughter’s two boys when Contact took them away. William looked a little like Cory, her oldest grandson. Cory had always been bringing things home. Stones, bottletops—cocoons. She had tried to share his interest, at least from a distance; had tried to enter that child’s world where everything was a mystery and a fascination. Perhaps William was fascinated with this—creature.
Abby’s heart was pounding desperately against her ribs. But she thought of Paul Jacopetti in the basement of the Buchanan hospital, and she resolved to quell her panic this time, not make the same mistake.
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “If it wants to leave,” she said, “why doesn’t it?”
“Abby, did you ever see a butterfly when it’s new? The wings are wet. They have to dry. Otherwise it would just fall.”
“I see. How much longer?”
“Minutes.”
“William—I can’t stop anyone from coming upstairs.”
“But if you don’t call out—”
“I won’t.” She was steadily calmer. “But Colonel Tyler is searching the house.”
“We only need a short time, Abby.”
“A short time is all you may have.”
Even in this extremity, William was impressed by Rosa’s grace. She grasped the window frame with arms as delicate as strings, fingers like threads. She pulled herself up, paused on the sill facing inward, then unfolded her wings behind her, stretched them to their full span, wide sails, coral-patterned, the blues and purples a lighter hue in the sunlight. She was like an enormous orchid blossom. When the wind blew, she trembled.
Almost, Rosa told him. Now.
Then Abby gasped, the door opened: Colonel Tyler.
It was remarkable, Abby thought, how quickly Tyler seemed to grasp the situation. His eyes flickered from Abby to William to the insect woman. He was obviously shocked. But not shocked motionless, as Abby had been. His hand was suddenly active.
He drew that pistol he always carried.
“No,” Abby said.
The Colonel paid her no attention. His attention was wholly focused on the creature William had called Rosa, and his face was a twisted grimace of distaste. Abby had been afraid, but the Colonel—the Colonel, she realized, was offended.
He stood with his legs braced apart and aimed the pistol at Rosa with both hands.
Abby felt as if time had slowed to a miserly crawl. There was time to see everything. See William’s sadness and concern. See the insect woman arching her impossible wings against the morning sky. See Tyler’s pistol in all its intricacy, a complex steel-gray machine.
She heard the rasp of her own breath in her throat like the tick of a metronome. Time to see; no time to act.
But now William was moving.
For all the compression of time, Abby thought, the boy was quick. Impossibly quick. Inhumanly quick.
He threw himself at Tyler’s body. The impact turned the Colonel’s pistol toward the ceiling. Tyler fired, and the sound in the enclosed room was an insult to the ears, cruelly loud. Plaster rained from the ceiling. There was a hole there, ragged and small. “Christ!” Tyler raged.
Abby looked to the window, where the insect woman’s wings lifted, caught air, rippled; and then Rosa was away, dropping in a long trajectory, a glide… then rising…
Tyler staggered to the window, raised his pistol once more.
William was beside him, tugging his arm down.
Tyler pushed the boy aside. Abby heard William’s head crack against the wall.
“No!” she cried.
It was not a decent way to treat a child.
William straightened, unhurt; but Tyler’s gun was pointed at him now. “No!” Abby said furiously. “Colonel, stop!” Was he deaf?
William turned his face toward her. It was absurd, but Abby felt he wanted to reassure her. To tell her he would be all right. He was not all right.
The boy looked at Colonel Tyler and said, quite clearly, “I know what you are.”
Colonel Tyler pulled the trigger. William’s chest exploded. “NOOOO!” Abby’s voice was a wail of grief.
Tyler fired again, now at William’s head, where his eyes were still blinking. Abby could not bear the sound of the shot or the result of it. So much blood. She could not help thinking of Cory or her other grandson, Damian; of her daughter Laura. She had lost Laura to an airplane tragedy and Cory and Damian to the Greater World and although William wasn’t family Abby could not tolerate the loss of another child, any child, for the sin of impeding Colonel John Tyler’s line of fire. So she did what William had done, hurried across the room through slow-motion time, knowing it was too late, seeing but not seeing the impossible amount of blood, and threw herself at Colonel Tyler, who fell backward. Then they were wrestling for the pistol, Abby surprised by her own physical strength and the strength of her hatred, eyes blurred by tears, wanting to rip the pistol from Tyler’s hand and punish him with it but managing only to twist it in his grip, and Tyler pulled the trigger twice more, both shots wild, chipping paint and dust from the wallboard, until at last her strength and courage ebbed and Tyler thrust her aside and sat with the pistol aimed at her—Abby thinking Shoot me, go ahead, you child-murdering bastard!—then someone was holding her from behind, and Tyler, horribly, was pointing his pistol at the boy’s corpse:
“Abby, he’s not human. Look!” Nudging the limp body with his foot. “This isn’t blood! Christ’s sake! It looks like thirty-weight motor oil! Jesus!”
Did any of that matter?
No, Abby thought.
In a gesture that surprised even herself, Abby collected all the saliva that remained in her dry mouth and spat into Colonel Tyler’s face. Her aim was precise.
Tyler froze.
Everyone in the room—a crowd, now, including Bob Ganish, Paul Jacopetti, and Joey Commoner, who was holding her from behind—froze and waited.
“Take her to her trailer,” the Colonel said. The spittle ran down his cheek, and his voice was a razory whine. “Take her there and keep her there. I’ll deal with this later.”
Rosa Perry Connor rode the morning thermals up long inclines of warming air until the ranch was far below her.
She moved in the sky with an easy familiarity. The sky was not an empty space, not a vacuum; it was an ocean, Rosa thought, rich with currents, inviting discovery, appreciation, acrobatics: glides and sweeping, sensuous curves. It was intoxicating.