"What convinced you?" he asked.
Liz gave a snort of laughter. "A mouse. I saw you heal Fred in the lab. And I realized that someone who cared so much about a little mouse life could never be a murderer."
Her expression turned serious. "I shouldn't have needed the mouse as proof, Max. I've seen you do hundreds of kind, good things over the years. You always know when someone is hurting, and you always try to help. You're the best guy I know. Really."
Max felt as if someone had reached into his chest and squeezed his heart. He'd never guessed Liz gave him a thought when they weren't working on one of their lab experiments. But she had noticed things about him, and she cared about him. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice.
He grabbed a handful of crackers and threw them into the pond. He didn't know what to say.
"Do you remember anything about the crash?" Liz asked. "I know I freaked out when you tried to talk to me about it before, but I'd like to hear it now if you want to tell me."
"No. I wasn't even born yet-that's probably why I survived. I was in some kind of incubator when the ship went down." Max picked up a stick and started poking a row of holes in the dirt. "The first memory I have is of breaking out of the incubator pod and being in a big cave. I was about seven years old-well, that's how old the social services people thought I was, anyway, even though I'd been in the pod for a long, long time."
Liz picked up another stick and started drawing petals and stems on the holes Max made, turning them into flowers. She shook her head. "You must have been so scared. What happened to you? How did you make it out of the desert all alone?"
"I wasn't alone." Max hesitated. He'd spent so many years not talking about this. He'd been the one who made Isabel and Michael swear they would never say a single word about their past to anyone. But Liz had gone to the mat for him, and she deserved the whole truth. Not just about him-about all of them.
"Isabel was with me-we shared the pod," Max said.
Liz nodded. "I wondered if she was, you know, because she's your sister."
"We picked a direction and started walking. We lucked out. We ended up at the highway just as Mr. and Mrs. Evans were driving back into town. They picked us up and took us home, and we never left.
"I don't know why they fought so hard to keep us. Two kids who couldn't speak English, who couldn't speak any language. Kids who didn't know how to use a toothbrush or a toilet. Kids who had been found wandering naked along the highway."
Max hurled his stick away. He hadn't thought about all this junk for so long.
"Our parents-our adoptive parents-were amazing," he continued. "They took turns teaching us at home until we were ready to start at Roswell Elementary."
"You must have learned fast. In third grade you knew the answer to every question the teacher asked. I still remember," Liz said.
"You still remember because you're so competitive. You didn't like anyone else getting points from Ms. Shapiro," Max teased. "But it's true. Isabel and I were both pretty much able to absorb information immediately. When our parents read us a book, we could always recite the whole thing back to them after hearing it just once. I guess we have really good adaptive skills. I think our systems, and our bodies, patterned themselves after what they found here."
"Wow." Liz shook her head. "I guess you don't have to spend much time on homework."
"Not really," Max admitted. "But my parents are always bringing home books-a lot of their law books, some medical books and stuff. They don't let me slack off."
He grinned, thinking of his dad's constant, good-natured nagging. What would his life be like if the Evanses hadn't found him?
It would be like Michael's life, he realized suddenly. Bouncing from foster home to foster home, never feeling like you belonged.
"Did you understand what you were?" Liz asked. "I mean, did either of you know where you came from?"
"No, at least not at first," Max said.
"I can't even imagine what it must have been like for you," Liz said. "I have this huge extended family right here in town. I know everything about them-and they know everything about me. And it doesn't stop there. At bedtime my parents used to tell me stories about my ancestors."
Liz stared out at the lake. "You know, in Spanish there are way more verb forms you can use to talk about the past than the future. I guess that shows how important the past is to my family."
She turned to Max. "I wish I could give you some of my history. Then you wouldn't feel so lonely on this… world."
"It got easier when I started school," Max said. "Because I met Michael, and we both realized pretty quickly that we were… alike."
Liz's eyes widened. "Michael? He's a… one of… He's one, too?"
"You can say it. A-li-en," Max answered. "I don't think there's a politically correct term. We don't even know what planet we're from, so we don't know what to call ourselves. And yeah, Michael is one, too."
He frowned a little. He hadn't meant to tell her about Michael. But somehow it just came out. He couldn't seem to keep any secrets from Liz.
"Are there more of you? Is it like this whole underground community?" Liz asked.
Max scrubbed his face with his fingers. He knew it was normal for Liz to have a lot of questions, but he was starting to feel like some kind of freak. "Just the three of us. I think. We've never seen any indication that there are others.
"When we got older, we spent a lot of time talking, trying to remember everything we possibly could. We all had these memories of another place, a place like nothing we'd seen, even in books. I think they're shared memories that people on my planet are born with-you know, like humans have inborn instincts."
"I think I saw a few of them when you let me connect with you," Liz said. "I saw a sky with acid green clouds."
"Yeah, Michael and Isabel and I all have that memory, even though none of us has ever seen anything like those clouds."
Suddenly Max wondered what else Liz had seen during the connection. Did she know how he felt about her? He hoped not. He'd already had too many humiliating conversations with Liz. He never wanted to have the one where she said she liked him as a friend. That would make him want to shrivel up and die.
He cleared his throat. "We did some research and discovered where Michael had been found. Then we got a map and drew a circle that encompassed that spot and the place where our parents found Isabel and me. We started making searches of the area-first on our bikes and later in my Jeep. And we finally stumbled on the cave. Our cave. When we saw the incubation pods, we pretty much realized the truth about ourselves. By then we'd all heard the story of the Roswell Incident-so we knew that the silvery material of our pods matched the description of some of the material of the debris found at the crash site."
"Do you know how the pods got to the cave?" Liz asked.
"We talked about that. We think one of our parents must have managed to hide the pods before they died."
Max knew the aliens in the ship must have been badly injured from the crash. But someone had climbed out of the wreckage and done whatever it had taken to save Max, Isabel, and Michael. Whoever it was must have loved us, Max thought. He felt his throat tighten up.
"Valenti got the facts pretty much right. He said he thought an alien child had survived the crash," Liz said. "I don't know how he knew that."
Max felt stricken. Maybe the alien who moved them had tried to go back to the ship, tried to save the others. And maybe Valenti's organization had found that alien, captured it, tortured it, gotten information from it.
My parent, Max thought. Maybe Valenti's people hurt one of my parents.
"We've got to come up with a plan," Liz was saying. "Valenti's not going to give up. He's going to track you down, no matter how long it takes."