Chapter Text
Judging by the sunlight that played off the surface of the ocean in the morning, July 2 1937 was going to be a nice day. All the instruments at the Lau base showed the same thing – there would be no other day more suited to do this. It was going to be a day for the history books. This otherwise unremarkable Friday would be forever remembered in the history of aviation as the day that Amelia Earhart set out on the last leg of her twenty-nine thousand mile journey around the world.
The last stop before Earhart's plane, the Electra, would brave the expanse of the Pacific Ocean was to be Howland Island, where she would stop to refuel and make absolutely sure that the Electra was fit to make the journey. The members of the United States Coast Guard stationed on the cutter Itasca off the coast of Howland were trying to maintain a stable two-way radio connection with the Electra in order to successfully navigate her to the island's landing strip.
The connection was patchy at best, and at around noon local time, it completely fizzled out. The navigator on the Itasca was giving instructions to Fred Noonan, Earhart's co-pilot and navigator, unaware that no sound came through on the other end.
A fledgling colonist of Itascatown emerged from her tent and looked out to sea towards New Guinea, expecting to catch a glimpse of the Electra in the distance. Despite its name, Itascatown wasn't a town at all – it was nothing but a small forest of tents that the crewmen of the Itasca had pitched on the island's western side in the hope that it would one day grow into its shoes.
The colonist took a sip of bitter coffee from a tin cup, scoping the empty horizon. Behind her, two meteors illuminated the noon sky like two blazing new suns. She never even noticed them.
"I repeat, we are on the line 157/337," Fred Noonan shouted into Electra's radio. All that answered him was static. "Amelia, something's messing with our instruments."
"Did you check—" A flash of bright light stopped Amelia Earhart's words. She squinted, trying to keep the plane on its course even though she was temporarily blinded. She heard a loud bang, like a gun had gone off in the cockpit. Her ears ringing, eyes streaming from the light, she clutched the control wheel for dear life. Fred grabbed her shoulder, and she turned her head to see him go pale, his eyes widening. His mouth opened, but she couldn't hear anything but the ringing in her ears. She shook her head. Fred pointed forwards, and she could see that his hand was shaking.
A giant plume of smoke was rising from an island not too far away from them. Amelia didn't need to consult Fred's map to know that the island was virtually within spitting distance of Howland. She stared at it, watching the smoke curl blackly into the sky while Fred checked the instruments. The ringing in her ears had subsided, and she could only just make out what he was saying.
"What the hell was that? Was that some sort of meteor?"
Amelia looked away from the smoke, checking the fuel gauge. They had enough for another five hundred miles, twice the distance from Howland Island. "It must have been. I've never seen one before," she said. "I didn't expect them to be this bright in broad daylight."
"They're not," said Fred. Amelia gently turned her control wheel to the right. "What are you doing?"
"I want to see where it landed. We have enough fuel to make the trip, and this kind of opportunity doesn't come up that often," she explained.
Fred shook his head. "You're the boss." He fiddled with a knob on the radio, but was met with static once again. He abandoned it as a lost cause, and instead looked forward, frowning at the rising smoke. "I hope you know what you're doing."
"It will be a chance to see a piece of the universe from up close," Amelia retorted. "How many men can claim they've done that?"
Her navigator said nothing. As the Electra approached the small island, Amelia could make out a tall mountain looming over a jungle and a large lagoon on the other side of the island. Everything else was obscured by the smoke. She took hold of the throttle lever, slowing the plane down. She could now make out the shape of the trees. The meteor had crashed at the very edge of the jungle. Angling the plane so it wouldn't fly straight into the plume of smoke, she tipped the nose down. The plane started dropping slowly.
"There!" Fred said. She saw it, too – a clearing on the south-west side of the island, away from the smoke and just big enough to safely land the Electra.
The plane touched down onto the clearing with a soft bump. Amelia could feel a knot of excitement forming in the pit of her stomach as she unbuckled her seatbelt and scrambled out of her seat. She had her hand around the lever that opened the aircraft door. "Coming, Fred?"
The navigator hovered uneasily. "That jungle looks pretty thick from where I'm standing," he said. "There could be dangerous animals out there. The only weapon we have is a flare gun."
"If there are, they won't come out for a while. The noise probably frightened them off. They won't approach us," said Amelia. She pushes the lever down and swung the plane door open.
As she stepped onto the ground, all her senses were assaulted at once. The smell of burning was so strong it stung her nose. The sun hit the grass and treetops in an explosion of green. It was unlike any colour green she had yet seen, almost too vivid to look at directly. Other grass seemed withered in comparison to the type that grew on this island; the trees of Toluca Lake were crude crayon drawings, pale copies of the trees she saw now.
"This place is incredible," said Fred, joining her. He bent down and picked a wildflower. It was a cornflower, but the blue was so vivid that it seemed to pulsate in front of Amelia's eyes. "This must be what the poets have in mind when they talk about Paradise."
Amelia looked to the sky. The smoke had thinned to wisps – soon it would vanish entirely. All she needed to do to find the meteor crash site was follow the smoke, and all that stood in her way seemed to be a grassy hillock. She began to walk in the direction of the smoke, taking long, purposeful strides.
They reached the top of the hillock as Amelia was beginning to feel beads of sweat on her forehead from the humid air. Fred had loosened his tie, and she saw that his shirt stuck to him with perspiration. Up here, the smell of smoke was stronger. Before she noticed anything else, the lagoon caught Amelia's eyes. The water was a perfect teal, and out of it rose a massive structure hewn out of stone. It was covered in so much lichen and moss that it appeared green from a distance. Almost vertical steps led to a door which was merely a gaping black hole. On the very top of the structure stood an enormous statue of a frog. Eight pillars were placed in a circle around it.
"That thing looks ancient," she said.
"I could draw every single map of this area blindfolded, and I've never even heard this place mentioned," said Fred. He rubbed the back of his neck, both to relieve the tension and wipe the sweat away.
Amelia could see the crash site now. A good chunk of the bottom of the hillock was missing. There was a wide crater at the foot of it, wide enough to fit her entire plane twice over. In the middle of the crater there were two round, smoking lumps. And among the lumps, something moved. Fred had already started walking down the hillock to the crater when she noticed it.
"Fred!" she called, and he stopped in his tracks, turning towards her.
"What is it?" The wind had picked up, and was whipping his tie in the air.
"There's something in the crater!" Not waiting for his retort, she sped down the hillock as fast as she dared, the wind sending her short hair flying. "Look!" she said, pointing between the meteors. "Didn't you see it move?"
"What are you talking about?" said Fred, but Amelia had already stepped into the crater. The wind had picked up to a gale, and she had to turn the collar of her jacket up to at least try and shield herself from it. And then, hidden behind the bigger meteor, she saw it.
Babies.
There were two of them, a boy and a girl. They had identical shocks of coal black hair and dark skin crusted over with dirt. The girl was sucking her thumb and appeared to be asleep. There was a book next to the boy, a huge, fat tome half-buried in the ground. The boy was looking around with clever blue eyes, taking in his surroundings. He spotted Amelia and stared at her for a couple of seconds. And then he began to scream.
"Amelia, are you—are those children?" Fred had to shout over the wind, even though he was standing right next to Amelia. "How did they get here?"
"I think… I think they got here on the meteors," said Amelia.
"That's impossible!" said Fred as the baby boy continued to scream. He walked up to him and scooped him up in his arms, stroking his sparse hair and attempting to shush him. He took his tie and waved the end of it in front of the boy's face. Two chubby hands grabbed it and the baby brought it to his mouth and started sucking on the fabric. "We need to get them into the plane! Get them to Howland!" said Fred. "Get the girl!"
Amelia crouched down and gingerly lifted the still sleeping girl into her arms, taking special care not to wake her. She felt slightly foolish for doing this – if she didn't get woken up by the boy's screaming, she certainly wouldn't be bothered by Amelia picking her up.
There was a roar above their heads. Amelia looked up. Even above the din and the wind, she heard Fred's loud curse.
It was as red as the Golden Gate and much, much bigger than the Empire State Building. She couldn't fathom what it was, except that it must have been some sort of plane. But no plane was this big or made this much noise. It obscured the sun. A hatch started sliding open at the bottom of the leviathan, and Amelia didn't have a second thought – holding the baby tight in her arms, she ran, hoping that Fred had enough presence of mind to follow.
The climb back to the top of the hillock felt thousands of miles long. Encumbered by the wind and the sleeping girl, she could feel her leg muscles starting to protest, but she kept going until, finally, she reached the top. She could see the Electra just as they had left her. She could slide down to the bottom of the hillock and then run to the plane. She would make it.
There was a shout behind her.
She turned around to see Fred stumble and fall to the ground. He rolled to the side trying not to crush the baby he was holding, and Amelia saw that there were three big holes in his stomach. They were soaking his shirt with blood. The baby boy started crying again. He tried to crawl away from Fred, who was wheezing and clutching his midsection.
Amelia looked around, desperately trying to parse what had happened. She saw the weapon first, and the first thing that it reminded her of was Poseidon's trident. The tines were red with blood. And then she saw who was holding it.
She didn't understand what she was seeing – it was clearly a woman, but there was something wrong about her. She was taller than the tallest person Amelia had seen. Her skin was ash grey, and there were two orange horns coming out of her head. She pointed the trident at Amelia. A drop of Fred's blood fell to the ground.
"Hand over the girl," the woman said. When she spoke, Amelia could see her teeth were sharp like fangs.
She risked a look at Fred. His eyes were open, but he wasn't moving. His shirt was crimson with blood. He wasn't going to get up again. A lump formed in Amelia's throat, but she knew that tears wouldn't come. She was going to mourn him as soon as she was safely back on the plane and up in the air.
Very slowly, she started backing away, walking down the hillock and keeping her eyes on the grey-skinned woman. "You are not harming this child," she said.
"I have no interest in harming the child," the woman said, and took a step forward as Amelia took a step back. "Give her to me, and I will consider sparing you."
"People know I'm here," said Amelia. She could feel the baby beginning to stir in her arms. "They'll come looking for me. We sent a signal on the radio. They're probably already on their way."
At this, the strange woman laughed. "Your radio has been dead for a while. My ship's instruments are very good at incapacitating your primitive technology. It will be sweeps before they even find your bodies." She raised the trident, and Amelia turned around and started to run.
Her legs propelling her across the clearing and towards the Electra, she glanced down to see if the baby was okay. The baby's eyes were wide open and curiously green, and she looked perfectly content.
She was at the plane, she had made it. Not allowing herself to catch her breath, Amelia put the baby into the safety of the plane. Her heart pounding in her chest, she put both hands on the metal, and attempted to hoist herself in.
Amelia managed to place her knee on the floor of the plane when the trident hit her in the back. The pain flashed through her like lightning. She looked down, and saw the tips of the three tines poke through the front of her shirt. She exhaled in surprise, and felt her lungs filling up with blood.
Her vision swam, and she fell forward. Her face hit the cool metal of the floor.
The last thing Amelia Earhart saw was the green-eyed baby girl getting picked up by a pair of bejewelled, grey hands.
From the jungle, a dog barked.
Thunder churned overhead. The grey-skinned woman picked up the baby from the airplane with one hand. She used the other to pull her weapon from the dead pilot.
The first drops of rain started pattering on the meaty leaves of the jungle trees. The strange woman reached the top of the hillock. She pushed the navigator's body with the toe of her boot, and it rolled down the hillock, landing in a heap at its foot.
Above, a sound came from the great ship like the bray of an angry whale. The baby on the hillock had stopped crying and was looking up at the ship. He raised his arms towards it, clenching and unclenching his fists like he was trying to grab it. Rain washed the dirt from his face, and he laughed.
A white dog watched from the underbrush. As the rain came down, it padded onto the clearing and towards the hillock, its eyes set on the children.
It was going to protect them.
Jade Crocker associated her earliest memory with the smell and warmth of a wet dog on a rainy day. Halley had been a constant in her life since before she knew how to speak or walk. That rainy day, with her brother crying beside her and her crying with him because she didn't know how to make him stop, Halley had gently nuzzled at John and surprised him so much that he actually stopped crying. They had both pushed their fingers into Halley's white fur and pressed against him, because even a damp dog was better than just the rain.
Then, the sweet-smelling lady who Jade would learn to call her mother had pulled them away. Jade could recall how she had cried her eyes dry at the lack of a warm dog to hold. Even though her future mother smelled like cinnamon, and even though both her and John were soon sitting in the dry, bundled into warm blankets, Jade had missed the dog that had kept her safe.
The last moment of her first memory was falling asleep to the burr of the engine of what her mother had later said was her private plane. Jade had flown in a plane afterwards, when she was a bit older and she could talk in words rather than gurgles and frowns, but the engines had never sounded to her as loud as they sounded that day, like she was laid on top of a large, snoring beast.
Her other childhood memories were a collage of red and white. Red like mixing bowls and spoons, like the hairband their mother always wore to keep her long, raven hair pulled from her face. White like flour and starched aprons that their mother wore, white like the icing her brother piped on the cakes their mother had baked. Red like the cocktail cherries Jade put on top while her mother held her over it when her legs were too short to reach the top of the counter.
Jade and John's mother was the owner of a great baking empire named after her. But the war was on, and although the folks at home still had plenty of use for cake mixes and baking paraphernalia, all eyes were turned towards the boys on the front and what could be done for the war effort.
From the east to the west coast, the entire country struggled to keep a brave face and maintain as normal a life as they could. The only connection to the war for Jade was when she appeared on the posters that her mother's company had made to aid the buying of war bonds. She and John were dressed in school uniforms, she in a dress and he in a little jacket and tie, all red and white. A tentative smidge of blue was added to represent America, but the first reference was Betty Crocker. They had combed Jade's thick, shiny black hair, her pride and joy, away from her face and wove it into two braids that she hated. Then they put child-sized gas masks on their faces and told them to hold hands.
They were dubbed the Crocker twins, and when the first printing of the poster had arrived to their home, fresh off the press, their mother had sat them both at the kitchen table and asked them to read to her what was written on the poster. Jade had read Dead God, keep them safe! Buy war bonds and stamps! until the letters floated on the backs of her eyelids when she closed her eyes.
On August 7, 1945, when Jade and John were eight years old, the main headline of the New York Times reported that the first atomic bomb, equal to 20,000 tonnes of TNT, had been dropped on Japan. Jade was feeding Halley scraps of bacon from her plate of breakfast when her mother had finished reading them the article. She asked, "Jade, what do you think?"
Jade withdrew her hand from Halley's mouth immediately, wiping his drool on the hem of her skirt. Her mother didn't like dogs, and she only tolerated Halley because she had very little to do with him: since they had been very small, Jade and John had learned to take care of him as well as he took care of them. Jade cast an inquiring look at John, but he was too busy demolishing his plate of waffles to notice her.
"It's scary that something can cause so much damage," she said. Her mother lay down the newspaper and watched her.
"Do you remember when Mr Fermi visited us two years ago?" she asked.
"Yeah! He was that nice man who helped us make a crystal radio," said Jade. It was the first time she had built something by herself and had it work. Mr Fermi, a man with a foreign accent and a tweed suit, visited their mother one day to talk business. He had stayed long enough to teach Jade and John how to build their own radio receiver using an antenna wire, a tuning coil of copper wire and a crystal detector. Jade remembered the joy she felt when they picked up a faint, garbled signal from the local radio station and Mr Fermi's kind smile at her enthusiasm.
"He was one of the brave men who helped develop that weapon," her mother said.
Jade remembered Mr Fermi as an exceedingly nice man, although he didn't seem to be very good with children. He mostly talked to them about stars and space. Jade didn't think these were appropriate topics for children their age, and that's why she liked them immensely. Mr Fermi said that he was a scientist working a little way away, in Hanford. When Jade had asked what he was working on, he tapped his nose and said that it was a secret.
"He gave me a piece of chocolate and called me a good little boy because I helped carry his briefcase to his car," said John, grinning. There was a piece of waffle stuck between his teeth. Jade remembered the two men who came with Mr Fermi, and how they had left their house with big silver strongboxes branded with the Betty Crocker logo.
"That means he helped kill all those people!" Jade said. She didn't feel like finishing her breakfast anymore. Halley put his nose in her lap, trying to lick any leftover bacon grease from her fingers.
"Of course not. He's a scientist, and they don't kill people. They invent and help the nation advance for the good of everyone," her mother argued. "Science is impartial, it's those who use it that make it bad or good." She adjusted her hairband. "Do you understand the meaning of this war, Jade?"
"It's to help us be free," said Jade. "But could they not do that without killing so many innocent people?"
"Strikes like that are necessary to end further suffering. The human race will always have its petty squabbles," her mother said, sipping her coffee. "There will always be fights over something; territory, resources or people, and you need to make sure that you're on the side of the winners."
"How do you know which side that is?" asked Jade.
"You make the biggest weapon and then shoot everyone else with it!" John said and started laughing. Her mother smiled into her cup.
"Well, I'm not going to make weapons!" said Jade resolutely. "When I grow up, I'm going to be a scientist like Mr Fermi, and I'm going to learn how to use science to help people! And I'm going to invent something that stops war forever, so nobody has to fight ever again!"
"You can't be a scientist, you're a girl!" John objected.
"I can be anything I want, you dunderhead!"
"No you can't!"
"Yes I can!"
"No you can't! I read a book and it said that boys were scientists and doctors and pilots, and girls were nurses and teachers and wives. So there!" John stuck his chin in the air, convinced he had won. Exasperated, Jade kicked her legs under the table and landed a blow straight into John's shin. He yelped in pain and kicked back almost immediately, but Jade had already pushed her chair away and got up from the table. "You're terrible and I hate you!" he shouted after her as she pulled the back door open, Halley following close in her wake. Jade left the door ajar, marching furiously towards the front of the house.
Before the kitchen was out of earshot, she heard their mother say, "You will treat your sister with the respect she deserves!" A slap echoed, followed immediately by John's affronted wail, and then Jade couldn't hear them anymore.
She threw herself into the large tire swing hanging from the tree in front of their house, and kicked her feet against the ground as hard as she could, flying further and further into the air as she swung to gain momentum and height. Her long hair flying around her face, she stared at the green leaves of the tree and the blue sky of suburbia, adamant in her decision not to cry.
Halley sat next to the foot of the tree, watching as she kicked up dirt and got it on her fresh white socks. He waited until John came out through the front door and sat down in the grass next to him. Halley licked his cheek, and John laughed. He scratched Halley's head and sat with his knees pulled close to his chest. When Jade jumped down from the tire swing, he sniffed and asked if he could have a turn. Jade asked if his cheek hurt, and John said that Halley had made it all better. He got on the tire swing, and Jade started pushing him.
Halley lay down in the grass, resting his head on his paws and watching the pair of them. He was raising them well.
When the war was over, a strange man with greying hair and an impressive moustache appeared on the Crocker doorstep. From her and John's room, where she had been doodling Sir Isaac Newton getting hit on the head with an apple, Jade heard her mother's scream. She ran out in time to see her mother being embraced by a man dressed in a neat white linen suit. He stroked her mother's hair, which she always wore loose, and then he noticed Jade. He had close set eyes and a heavy brow which made him appear to be frowning, but when he smiled at her, his entire face changed to a look of kindness.
"Dear Jade," he said. "You probably don't remember me."
"This is my husband, Jade," her mother said. "Colonel Sassacre. He's your father, and John's, too."
"You were both babies when I left for the war," the man said.
"He's not our father," said Jade. She had come downstairs, but she was keeping her distance from the man and stood on the opposite end of the room from him and her mother. "You adopted us."
"What does that matter?" her mother wanted to know. "We're still a family. Complete at last!"
"I've never seen him before!" Jade said.
"Don't be silly, Jade," said Sassacre. Her mother frowned heavily. A deep wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. "Remember when you were three years old and we made mudpies after the rain? Your mother was so angry when she found out you got mud all over your nice yellow dress!" He laughed in good humour, expecting Jade and his wife to join in. Neither of them did.
"I don't wear yellow," Jade told him. "Neither does John. Mother hates that colour on us."
Sassacre looked perplexed. Jade watched her mother squeeze his hand very firmly, and he laughed again. "Sure, of course!"
The swing doors to the kitchen swung open and out came John, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich halfway to his mouth, Halley walking hopefully behind him. John noticed Sassacre and stopped dead. "John, my boy!" Sassacre exclaimed, extending his arms to John. "Look who's back! Come give your old man a hug!"
"Uh—" John tried.
Halley's ears twitched and Jade watched as he very cautiously stalked to Sassacre. He never took kindly to strangers, and Jade was half expecting him to bite the Colonel. She could hear a low growl coming from the dog's throat. And then, when Halley was about an arm's length away from the Colonel and Jade's mother, he stopped growling. He sniffed the man's fingers and then licked his hand affectionately, his tail wagging.
"See?" Sassacre said jubilantly. "Halley remembers me!" He patted Halley's head, and the dog gave a single happy bark. This seemed to jolt John from whatever kind of reverie he was in, and he ran to Sassacre's side and hugged his midriff, careless of the sandwich he was still holding.
Jade watched their mother fix her hairband, an expression of smug satisfaction on her face. "Come and hug your father, Jade," she said. It wasn't a request. It was the kind of tone she used which promised dire consequences if she was disobeyed.
"How do you not remember? He wrote the book, Jade! Dad wrote the Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery, his picture is in it," argued John. Jade remembered the book – John was practically inseparable from it since even before they could read, but she never cared for it that much. She wasn't interested in practical jokes, and the thing was entirely too heavy to lift. It could probably break Halley's back if she accidentally dropped it on him, so she didn't even try to pick it up.
"We don't have any pictures of him in the house," said Jade to her mother. "You've never mentioned him. You don't even wear a wedding ring!" Something was not entirely right here, and she was extremely upset by the fact that she was the only one to notice it.
Even Halley, her faithful dog, had failed her. Jade was sure he would bite the Colonel and confirm her doubts, but he was sitting peacefully next to the man. Together with John and her mother they would look like the perfect family portrait in Betty Crocker red and white, were it not for the angry flash in her mother's eyes. "The Colonel and I accepted you into our home and treated you like our own children, and this is how you show your gratitude?" she demanded.
"I don't remember him!" Jade shouted, her voice rising in pitch. "Stop lying to me!"
"That's enough, Jade!" her mother snarled. Her face was so contorted with anger it made Jade take a step back. Her shoulder hit the newel post. "You will learn to be a good daughter!"
Her mother moved in a flutter of skirts and grabbed something from the mantelpiece. It glinted in her hand – it was the letter opener she used for all the mail they got in the house, with an intricately carved metal handle embedded with garnets. "Come here!"
Jade went to scramble up the stairs, but she was too slow. Her mother grabbed her by the hair and pulled hard. Jade staggered backwards, feeling like her scalp was on fire as her eyes streamed with pain. "Let me go!" she yelled, trying to shake her mother off. Every time she moved, a piercing pain shot through her scalp. She felt like all her hair would get pulled out from its roots.
"I am going to teach you a lesson, you ungrateful glubbin' wiggler!" her mother yelled.
"John, help me!" Jade grabbed the banister, pulling herself up the stairs. She looked towards John, and couldn't understand what she was seeing – both he and Sassacre were just standing there, looking at her with polite smiles on their faces.
"You need to be taught a lesson, Jade," said John. "You're a bad human daughter, and you should be culled."
"Why are you talking like that?" Jade demanded. John shrugged, still grinning. "Halley! Get her, boy!" Halley sniffed the air like he was trying to pinpoint a certain scent, and then whined in his throat and raised one paw, as if begging. "Halley!" The dog didn't seem to have heard her. "What's going on?"
Her mother bared her teeth in an ugly grin. Her perfectly done hair was coming apart, and her usually composed face was now twisted with malice. "Do you see how terrible it is when nobody cares about you, Jade? When all the hard work and the love you've put into something isn't appreciated?" She raised the letter opener above Jade's head, and Jade felt her whole body tremble in fear. "Maybe you'll remember now!"
She raised the letter opened, and Jade squeezed her eyes shut.
The tug on her hair vanished altogether. Jade stumbled forward, throwing her arms out and falling painfully on the stairs. She scrambled to stand up, fixing her glasses. There was an odd feeling on the back of her neck, and when she reached out to touch it, her fingers found nothing but her skin where they would usually tangle in thick, black hair.
Jade turned to see Betty Crocker holding a long shock of black hair – Jade's hair – in her hand. Behind her, John and Sassacre started clapping mechanically, like wind-up toys.
"Go to your room," her stepmother said. Jade had never heard of a mother, adoptive or not, use a tone that was so hateful or treat a child that she claimed to love like this. So she decided that it simply wasn't true – the only thing Betty Crocker could be was her wicked stepmother, just like in fairytales.
Jade ran, falling upwards on the stairs in her haste.
She lay on her bed until her pillow was damp with tears. When she eventually fell asleep from exhaustion, she dreamt of flying towards a blue planet that looked almost but not completely different from Earth, and a boy in blue pyjamas that looked almost but not completely like John.
When she woke up the next morning, she didn't remember the dream or when she cut her long hair down to an unruly bob, but she was so happy to see her father back after so long that it didn't matter. After dinner, she watched him teach John how to make a snake nut can.
Betty Crocker stood by the mantelpiece, stroking her letter opener and smiling.
Jade's childhood was filled with books – she read anything she could find, but she mostly read books on science. Gregor Mendel made her want to grow peas, so she asked Sassacre to help her make a small vegetable patch at the back of the house. Her stepmother had given her seeds of sugarsnap peas and corn salad, and as they grew Jade felt that she was able to go for bigger things. Soon, the vegetable garden was sprouting a number of young pumpkins. Although the frost had not been kind, three of them had managed to grow almost to the size of Jade's head. Through Nikola Tesla's help she learned what made a lemon battery work the way it did; thoughts of Ada Lovelace kept her going during math lessons, and it was Marie Curie that she looked up to the most, since she was the only modern female scientist that Jade knew of.
She spent her free time reading, gardening, taking Halley to the lake near the woods not far from their house and climbing up trees until her knees were scraped and her dress dirty. John sometimes joined her, but with increasingly less enthusiasm. So she stopped asking him, and eventually it was just her and Halley, in the garden, around the lake, on the quiet and calm streets of the suburbs.
One day when she was thirteen, Jade had gone into the cupboard under the stairs to look for an old pair of chattery teeth. She planned to take the wind-up mechanism out because she planned to put it into a small robot she was trying to build out of discarded soup cans.
The small, stuffy space under the stairs held many forgotten and discarded things: the training wheels from John's first bicycle, broken toys, a dollhouse Jade never played with and old jigsaw puzzles nobody was ever interested in finishing.
As her fingers groped on the dusty shelves, Jade felt a cylindrical object: the old Quaker Oats box with plastic coated wire wrapped around it. She took it down, dust raining on her, and sure enough – it was the crystal radio that Mr Fermi had helped them make when they were six. Even the earphones were there, entirely intact, if dusty. As she took them down too, the cord caught on something and it clattered to the floor. A pair of chattery teeth.
Holding the radio and the teeth to her chest, Jade went up to her room. She found John sitting on his bed, reading a dog-eared copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was wearing a pair of Groucho glasses and squinting through them since he, like Jade, could see very little without his prescription glasses.
"Don't read like that, numbskull, you'll hurt your eyes," said Jade. "Look what I found under the stairs!" She held up the radio.
John squinted at it. "Is that the toy we made?"
Jade nodded. "I want to see if it still works!" She sat down on the bed next to John with the radio in her lap and put the headphones over her ears. There was nothing, just garbled static. She turned the knob on the tuning capacitor, very slowly, and waited.
"It doesn't work, does i—"
"Ssh, John! I think it's picking something up!" Jade continued turning the knob, and then amidst the static came a voice.
"… scampering about like a bunch of time-wasting idiots and converge in the conference room. Our exalted ruler is coming in for a routine inspection. I am going crazier than a cholerbear in heat in this f—"
"It's some kind of radio show!" Jade said, removing one of the earphones. "Come here, listen!" John scooted over, yanking the earphones as far as they would go so he could listen in. The broadcast continued.
"… pathetic humans on the fenestrated walls day in, day out. Covert invasion, she said, indoctrinate them and then cull them, she said, get my people acclimatised, glub, glub, what kind of operation am I running here, is this goddamn Prospit?"
"This is really weird—" John tried, but Jade shushed him as the voice went on, sounding more and more exasperated.
"Not to mention I've had to do double shifts because she wants constant vigilance both here and on Earth, like I haven't got enough on my plate as it is with catering to him. Why he has to keep using my fourth wall I will never know, and who the hell am I to ask anyway? I'm just a pen-pusher, according to Her Royal Glubness." The voice sighed, creating a rush of static that made Jade wince. "She's coming in through the Earth transportaliser, so I will ask the people in charge of that to make it so she doesn't trail leaves and mud from there. Need I remind you that the last time this happened, the Droll ate some of it and was sick for a week. And one more thing…" There was the sound of the rustling of papers. "Her lusus's food reserve is beginning to thin again, so I'm going to send the Hegemonic Brute down to the lake with a dozen or so volunteers later today. If you got the memo that you're a volunteer, you will show up or your shell will be used for sharpening my knives. Did everybody get that? Good."
Just like that, it stopped. Jade fiddled with the tuning knob, but nothing came out, just more static.
"He mentioned the lake," she said. "Do you think he meant the lake near our house? I wonder what a lusus is!"
"That wasn't real, though," John said. "It was probably a radio drama or something. Like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet!"
"What if it wasn't? What if there are Martians down at the lake and they're going to feed people to their queen bee?" Jade insisted.
"Do Martians have a queen bee?"
"I don't know, but we should find out!" Jade said, standing up.
She was at the door when John said, "Wait! It's dark, we can't go out after dark!"
Jade paused, crossing her hands over her chest. "You're right." She thought about this for a moment, and then exclaimed triumphantly, "We'll use the window, then!" She made it to the window in three strides.
"Jade!" John shouted just as she was lifting the latch.
"What?"
He replaced the Groucho glasses with his prescription ones and frowned at her. "I'm coming with, aren't I? I can't let my sister get hurt."
Jade laughed. "If there's anyone who needs protecting, it's going to be you!"
She pushed the window open and stuck her head out. The brisk autumn air tickled her face. There was just enough daylight left for her to be able to make out the pumpkin patch directly below her, right under the downstairs window. The sky in the distance was turning from a dark pink and orange into indigo blue. She gauged the distance between the window and the tall oak tree that grew behind their house. With a bit of momentum, she could make the jump and then climb down without too much fuss.
Jade grabbed a hold of the jamb and swung a leg over the sill. Down in the backyard, Halley emerged out of his doghouse. He sat down by the pumpkin patch and looked expectantly up at Jade. "Good dog, Halley! Be quiet!" she hissed. She swung her other leg over the sill, bracing both her hands on the jamb.
"Jade, have you ever done this before?" John said with concern.
Jade clicked her tongue. "I do it all the time when you're asleep, when Halley and I go for walks in the woods."
"You do?"
"Yes. Okay, I'm going to jump and then it'll be your turn, so get ready!" She inhaled deeply, readying herself.
"Jade, I'm not sure—" John tried, but Jade didn't hear the rest of that sentence because she was already flying through the air. She threw her arms out and caught a branch, and then used the rest of the momentum she had to hoist herself on it.
She looked up to see John's open-mouthed face staring at her, haloed by the light of their bedroom. She dropped to a lower branch, and then to an even lower one, and finally to the ground. Halley immediately went over and nuzzled against her side. Jade checked the kitchen window for any signs of movement. The light was on, but the blinds were drawn. The soft warbling of the radio could be heard from the inside. Jade crouched down nevertheless, gently stroking Halley's fur to keep him from barking.
"Come on!" Jade called to John, as loudly as she dared. "Turn the light off before you go!"
John reached for the light switch and clicked it off. Jade watched him do everything she did. He swung first one leg over the sill, then the other, he braced his hands against the jamb and jumped – but he missed the branch he was supposed to grab by a few crucial inches, and fell through the empty air.
Jade watched in stunned silence as he dropped like a brick, right into the pumpkin patch. There was a sound like a balloon popping. Terrified, she hurried to John just as Sassacre parted the blinds on the kitchen window. John whimpered, but Jade clapped both hands over his mouth, shushing him.
She could make out the faint tingling of Rum and Coca Cola by The Andrews Sisters coming from the other side of the window. The light from the kitchen spilled out onto the back lawn, illuminating Halley's front paws.
"Halley! Get back in your doghouse," Sassacre said. "I'd better not catch you digging around Jade's pumpkin patch! Betty isn't going to like it if she comes back home and finds that she has no more pumpkins to make pie with!" Jade held her breath, praying that he wouldn't open the blinds all the way and look in the pumpkin patch for any damage. Fortunately, Halley was a smart dog, so he turned on his heel and padded back towards his doghouse. Sassacre seemed content with this, because he closed the blinds and plunged the back yard into semi-darkness again.
Jade could feel John's tears wetting her fingers. She removed her hands very carefully and whispered, "Are you okay? Did you break anything?"
John shook his head. "That was the pumpkins. My ass hurts," he croaked. He sniffed, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
Jade cast a furtive glance towards the window, and judging it safe for the moment, she stood up and offered John her hand. "Come on, then," she said. "We have to fight those Martians!"
John took her offered hand, and she hoisted him to his feet. There was pumpkin all down the back of his shirt and trousers. Jade did her best to brush it off, ignoring how slimy and sticky it was. And then they were off across the lawn, across the deserted street and further, until they reached Pipe Lake, obsidian black and perfectly still under the light of the crescent moon. It was also perfectly empty of any Martians or their queen bee.
"There's nothing here," John said dejectedly. "And we ran all the way and my ass still hurts!"
Jade scanned the shore and the tree line, frowning. And there it was – a sudden movement about fifty feet to their left, where the trees were thicker and the woods began. She thought she saw someone in red, but it was getting so dark that she couldn't make anything else out.
She elbowed John's side. "There is someone there!"
"Where?"
"They just went into the woods over there, come on!"
She walked briskly down the shore and into the woods, John following reluctantly behind and struggling to keep up. Jade wasn't sure if she really believed her own story about the cannibalistic Martians, but whatever the crystal radio picked up, it didn't sound like anything from this world and she was eager to investigate what it was.
The woods were thick, but not as dark as Jade expected. The moonlight filtered through the trees and lit their way just enough so that they were able not to trip over their own feet or any tree roots while they walked.
After some time, just as Jade was thinking that this trek was leading them nowhere, since she had never gone this deep into the woods and she had lost her bearing a good while ago, the woods opened up into a moonlit clearing.
Jade paused in the shadow of the trees, because they weren't alone anymore.
There was definitely someone else on the clearing. She was standing in the very centre of it, looking furtively around. Jade hid behind a tree when her gaze seemed to sweep over her and John, and held her breath. When she dared to look around again, the woman was gone.
"Where did she go?" she whispered to John. "Did you see that? There was a woman there!"
John nodded. "She was there, and then the next moment she wasn't! What do you think happened?"
"I have no idea," said Jade, "but I think we should definitely try to find out!"
Making sure the clearing was deserted now, Jade stalked across the grass until she was at roughly the same spot where the woman had stood. There was again, disappointingly, nothing there. Jade heaved a sigh, turning to John. "Maybe you're right," she said. "Maybe it was just a radio play!" She threw her arms in the air miserably. "Maybe we should just—" On the upswing, her right arm hit something, hard.
Pins and needles coursed up her arm, and she lowered it, clutching her elbow which she had whacked against something solid. She looked around, but there was still just an empty clearing. Not wanting to admit defeat, she slowly raised her other arm and gingerly felt the air. Instead of passing through it like nothing, her fingers caught a corner of something cold and metal.
"John! Come over here, feel this!"
"Feel air? Jade—"
"No, come on, there's something here!" She grabbed John's wrist and placed his palm against the spot she was touching. She watched his expression change from slightly annoyed to utterly flabbergasted.
"It's invisible!" he exclaimed. "Jade! What if it's an invisible spaceship?"
"Of course it's an invisible spaceship," she said, utterly convinced of this fact now. "We just need to find a way in. Keep touching things, maybe there's a lever or something!"
"Do you think it's from Mars?" John asked as his hands steadily worked on feeling what appeared to be thin air.
"It could be," said Jade, letting her fingers skate across the cold metal.
"I thought that they said that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one," said John.
Jade's fingers found a bump in the otherwise smooth surface. She felt around it, figured out that it was probably a button, and pushed it. "But still, they come," she said. Faint sounds of movement came from behind them, and with a soft hiss, a portal opened a few inches from the ground, illuminating the clearing with a soft white light.
"Go through before it closes!" she instructed, and rushed through the door, John following behind. The door hissed to a shut the moment John was over the threshold, shutting them off from the relative safety and familiarity of the clearing.
What Jade saw then was neither safe nor familiar. Everything was red, red like the Betty Crocker logo, red like John's favourite bow tie which he only wore on special occasions, red like Jade's circle skirt she'd completely ruined one autumn when she slipped and fell into some mud, and red like the hairband her mother always wore.
The hairband that was now thrown carelessly on the floor.
Jade rushed to pick it up, and it was then that she noticed the tanks.
They had jars filled with formaldehyde that contained preserved animals in her and John's biology class, which was the first thing Jade thought of when she saw the tanks. They were twice or three times the size of people, and none of them contained anything Jade had ever seen in any biology textbook.
There were animals – large cats with multiple mouths, tiny bulls with wings, gargantuan goats with the tails of fish. Their fur and scales were all completely white, whiter even than Halley. There were hundreds of those, and then beyond them there were tanks that contained something Jade could describe in no way other than aliens. They had ash grey skin, black hair and horns coming out of their skulls in different shapes and sizes, all the colour of candy corn. Some of them had what looked like gill slits on the sides of their ribs. None of them seemed to be awake or aware of their surroundings, which Jade was thankful for – they looked horrifying.
"I don't like this place, Jade," said John.
"I wonder if they're all dead," Jade said, looking at a tank which housed what looked like a white centaur with a luxuriant moustache.
"Is that mom's hairband?" John asked, pointing to the hairband Jade was holding. "She never takes that off! Is she here?"
Jade squeezed the piece of plastic tight in her hand. It felt heavier than she thought it was. "If she is, we have to get her out. Let's keep going."
They walked through the rows and rows of tanks until there were no more rows left and they were faced with a dead end. There was nothing but the wall. On the floor, there were two small, round platforms with odd geometric shapes inscribed on them: one purple, one yellow.
"Do you think she went this way?" asked John.
"I don't see any other way out of here," said Jade, eyeing the platforms warily. "Maybe they're like elevators? There's no call button, though."
"I guess we just step on them and see what happens," suggested John. "Which one do you want to try?"
Jade considered this for a moment, and then said, "Purple. She hates yellow." John nodded. "Let's do it together." They held hands, and stepped onto the platform.
Jade waited for it to start going down, but instead she experienced the oddest sensation, like there was rope wrapped around her chest that sharply yanked her forwards, and then let go.
Instead of the red ship, there was purple everywhere. Purple spires, purple battlements, purple walls and buttresses, purple roofs and statues stretching into infinity under a pitch-black sky. They were standing on a walkway high on a cathedral-like building. When Jade risked a glance over the parapet, the drop made her dizzy. To their right there was a door, purple just like everything else. It was ajar, and Jade could hear voices coming from the inside. She met John's eyes and pressed her finger to her lips. He indicated zipping his lips shut. Jade started creeping towards the door as quietly as she could.
"… just setting up everything, Your Imperiousness. I didn't expect you to get here so early," a voice said. Jade recognised it as the same voice from the transmission she picked up with her crystal radio, but she didn't dare risk a peek behind the door just yet.
"Whale, I thought I'd betta drop in without giving you much time to prepare. I'd pike to sea how things are done here on a nightly basis, rather than when everyone knows the boss is coming." This was a woman's voice, one that Jade was certain she recognised but that she couldn't place.
"Of course," the man's voice sneered.
"Is the fourth wall on? What's taking so long, Arch Agent? I won't be played for a sucker! You know how he feels aboat waiting!"
"I'm doing it!" the man's voice was defensive. "That should do it, I think—"
"HANDMAID."
The voice was so sudden and so piercingly, startlingly deep that it almost made Jade recoil. It seemed to come from all around her and from the inside of her head at the same time, reverberating in her fingers and to the tips of her toes.
"No, that's the otter one," said the woman. "I prefer a different title."
"HER CONDESCENSION," the voice thundered. "AND THE ARCH AGENT."
"Hello," croaked the other man.
"IS EVERYTHING PREPARED? HOW LONG WILL I HAVE TO WAIT?"
"Yes, aboat that," the woman said. "Their technology is sweeps and sweeps behind ours. It is not nearly the time to do this. They would shrimply be of no worth to us."
"I DON'T CARE ABOUT WORTH. THEY NEED TO BE DESTROYED. IS THIS NOT WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO DO, CONDESCENSION? WHERE IS YOUR RACE? WHY AREN'T THEY MAKING THE PATHETIC HUMANS KNEEL?"
"Sailing hasn't been smooth," the woman confessed. "I've had my fins full trying to acclimatise my people to this plaice. But once they are able, they will rise and enslave the humans."
Carefully, Jade glanced behind the door into the room. It was entirely purple and featureless apart from four large grey walls in the centre. They were stood facing each other so that they formed a square, but they were set apart wide enough so that she could see what was going on between them. There was a creature standing next to the grey wall at a right angle from Jade. It was the shape and size of a human, but instead of skin it was covered in a black shell. White eyes peered at the wall opposite from where it was standing, and its lips were curled in discomfort to show white fangs. It was wearing a little black and white uniform. More than anything, it reminded Jade of a black chess piece come to life. This was the one they'd referred to as the Arch Agent.
"I AM NOT PATIENT," the tumultuous voice said, and Jade watched as the Arch Agent tried not to wince. She followed his line of sight, and then saw the woman.
Her skin was the same colour as the aliens Jade and John had seen in the tanks, except a darker, healthier hue. Her ebony hair curled to the floor like dark smoke, like a living thing, and her long, elegant horns curved up and outward, tall and piercingly sharp at the ends. Her arms were covered in golden jewellery, and there was a tiara resting on her forehead.
"I know, Lord English," she said. "The next few sweeps will pass quickly, and then we'll be ready to fulfil your porpoise."
The angle of the door made it possible for Jade to see what the woman was looking at on her wall. It was partitioned like a window, and in it Jade saw a huge green creature with a skull for a head, a snarling mouth with fangs and eyes that flashed colours so quickly that it made her nauseous if she looked at them too long. She didn't understand why she was so afraid of that thing, but she knew that she felt the urge to run immediately, to put as much distance between that creature and herself as she could.
"Wait until you hear my krilliant idea aboat the human wigglers!" the woman said triumphantly, and Jade realised why the voice sounded so familiar.
It sounded exactly like her stepmother's voice.
"ENTHRALL ME."
She looked down at the hairband in her hand, confused. John tugged at her elbow insistently, pulling her from the door and shaking his head. Jade tried to gesticulate to ask him what he was trying to say, but he kept shaking his head.
He pushed her onto the platform, there was the tug at her chest again, and they were back in the room with the tanks. Jade felt like she could breathe more easily, although she still felt a pressure in her lungs from hearing that monster's voice.
"We have to get out of here, Jade," said John. He still hadn't let go of her arm, and he was pulling her along and towards where they first entered this strange place. She wasn't resisting him, she just followed limply along.
That alien woman's voice had been so much like her stepmother's – the words were different, the tone was not like any Jade had heard her stepmother use, but it was the same voice that talked about cakes and discussed market shares on the phone and chided her about getting grass stains on her shirt. "Did you hear it?" she asked John.
"Hear what? Come on!"
"Her voice," said Jade, staring absently at a man in a tank. He had long curling horns and his black hair floated around his face in a cloud. "It sounded like Betty's."
"Whose? Come on, we're here," said John. They were standing at the place where they came in. The door was shut, but as soon as John got close enough, something appeared to happen and it hissed open, revealing the forest clearing beyond. It was still the same clearing they had left. Jade jumped out after John, and the door closed behind them as it did before. John started marching across the clearing, roughly in the direction of the lake. Jade was impressed he remembered which way to go, and she jogged along after him.
"John! That alien's voice sounded like our mother's! She talked about killing everyone with that—that thing!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"You were there, you heard it!"
"I did, but that kind of thing doesn't happen outside of books and comics, Jade," he said, throwing her an angry look over his shoulder.
"What—" she tried. "It literally just happened!"
"I don't want to talk about it!" he insisted. "I want to wake up at home, in my bed, and forget all about this dream. There's no such thing as Martians, Jade, or albino cats with two mouths, or walking chess pieces, or—or big green demons!"
"But you just—"
"I don't want to hear about your stupid fantasies!"
Stunned into silence, Jade walked miserably after him the rest of the way to their house. After some false starts, they managed to climb the oak tree back into their room and slip into their beds for the night without being noticed. Jade put her stepmother's hairband on her own nightstand, and drifted into a deep sleep.
When she woke up the next morning, the hairband was gone. Jade had started to believe that everything had been a dream, too; that there was no such thing as centaurs with moustaches, grey men with horns and gills and walking chess pieces.
But the pumpkins in her garden were all still crushed from last night.
It was 1953. Jade was sixteen, and she couldn't sleep for dreams of golden spires, frogs in the snow and a boy with light hair lying in her arms, covered with blood. In the dead of the night, around three in the morning when John's snores had died down and turned into calm breathing, Jade snuck out of the room and tiptoed down the stairs.
She'd stopped sneaking out of her and John's bedroom window years ago. Betty Crocker was taking off with lightning speed and more often than not their stepmother was not at home to shout at Jade or threaten to make her spend the night in Halley's doghouse should she try and sneak out in the middle of the night again. Jade was made to do that once or twice when she was fourteen, but it wasn't nearly as bad as she thought it would be, mainly because Halley was a source of both immense comfort and heat.
She grabbed a flashlight from under the sink where she always kept it just in case, and went out of the house through the back door. She shone the flashlight towards Halley's doghouse. He was asleep, but he raised his head expectantly when he saw the beam of light.
"Hey, boy," Jade whispered. "Want to go for a walk?" Halley yawned a big yawn, and for a moment Jade thought he was going to ignore her and go back to sleep. Instead, he stretched lazily and came out of the doghouse. Jade had never kept him on a leash – he was too clever a dog for that – so he just walked casually next to her as she went out onto the road and started walking out of their street. It always surprised Jade how eerily quiet the suburbs were at this time of night. Everything was like a ghost town instead of a vibrant neighbourhood that it was during the day.
She let her feet lead her wherever they wanted to go; it didn't matter, anyway, since she could walk these streets blindfolded by now. Above the red roofs of the houses loomed the bare metal skeleton of support beams and cranes – the future Betty Crocker factory that was being built just on the edge of the lake. The local newspapers had written that it was going to be the largest factory of its kind in America once it was completed. Betty had talked to Jade about putting her in charge of the factory once it was built and Jade was of age. She planned to eventually make Jade her right-hand woman in the entirety of what was increasingly being referred to as Crockercorp. Even though Crockercorp had branched out from just being a company for baking goods and utensils, and had recently established a department for experimental sciences, Jade wasn't entirely sure if she wanted this. She still sometimes dreamt of the tall, grey-skinned alien who had her stepmother's voice talking about enslaving and killing the human race.
Jade didn't realise she had come to the lake until Halley's excited barks alerted her to the fact. He ran into the shallows, splashing water everywhere and looking at her expectantly with his tongue lolling between his teeth, like he wanted her to join him in his antics.
She stuck her hands deeper into her coat pockets and shook her head at him, grinning. "Too cold for that, Halley!" she said. The dog whined in his throat with deep disappointment at Jade's painfully human understanding of hot and cold, which made her grin even wider.
Halley turned away and waded deeper into the water. And then he flattened his ears to his head and started growling. Jade watched, confused, as he backed out of the water like something in there had bitten him. Tail between his legs, he ran towards the tree line.
"Halley!" Jade called, going after him. She found him shivering behind a hazel bush, intermittently growling in the general direction of the lake. She crouched next to him, worried. "What's wrong? What's out there?"
She looked towards the lake, and noticed how its usually calm surface was now full of ripples. She quickly switched her flashlight off. She waited and watched, Halley shivering next to her, and then she saw a figure break the surface. Jade barely suppressed a gasp – it was the same person she had seen in that strange, purple room and thought it had been a dream, the same person with the long orange horns, grey skin and her mother's voice. The Condescension.
There was something wrapped around her as she rose out of the water – long white tentacles that were twice as thick as Jade's arm and appeared to glisten in the moonlight. Whatever they belonged to, it had to be as big as the lake itself. They deposited her gently on the shore. Halley started growling in a deep, angry burr. The alien woman was entirely naked, and as she stood and caressed the albino tentacles like they were a faithful friend, Jade saw vivid fuchsia slits on the sides of her chest that briefly fluttered open and close – gills. The tentacles retreated under the surface of the water, and then Jade noticed that the woman was holding something in her hand.
Jade's heart pounded painfully in her chest when she recognised it as her stepmother's hairband. The woman raised it and was about to put it on her head, when Halley tore out of the bushes, barking loudly.
Jade dove deeper into the hazel bush, trying to control her frantic breathing as the alien woman placed the hairband in her hair and turned towards Halley, incomprehension on her face turning to rage. The second the hairband was snug on her head, Jade watched her transform – her horns were gone, her sharp teeth blunted, and her skin turned from grey to a pale peach.
Where the alien had stood Jade now saw Betty Crocker, the woman she had understood to be her adopted mother all her life.
And then she remembered.
She remembered the strange man who had stumbled into their house who she was supposed to accept as her father just because Betty had said so. She remembered the struggle on the stairs when she was eight, the blank, blank look in John's eyes like he didn't have any control over his actions, and the sharp letter opener that had cut her hair to teach her a lesson. She felt her hair now – she had been growing it out, but it had yet to reach the impressive length that it had before it was cut.
The words You will learn to be a good daughter! echoed in Jade's mind. She felt sick. On the beach, the alien she thought was her mother screamed something at Halley, and the dog yelped, retreating back to where Jade was.
Jade didn't even care about the noise she made as she ran through the woods and back into the suburbs, didn't notice the way the branches tugged at her coat and scratched her hands. All she saw in her mind's eye was that creature transforming into a human, and the way the white tentacles shone in the moonlight.
The next morning, on January 7, 1953, President Harry Truman delivered his final State of the Union Address. All of America sat in front of their television sets or next to their radios and listened, almost all but the construction workers on the Betty Crocker factory in Maple Valley, Washington, who were working to a tight deadline.
"Meanwhile, the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our expectations," said President Truman. "Atomic science is in the full tide of development; the unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and irresistible."
The Crockers watched the address in their living room. John had stopped fiddling with his joy buzzer enough to pay attention to it. Sassacre had an ankle on his knee and listened, utterly absorbed and fingering his now increasingly greying moustache, as President Truman went on.
"Since Alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models," he said, "and we have produced them in substantial quantities. And recently, in the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok, we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy."
Jade was sitting on the stairs with Halley, absently picking at a tangle in his long fur. "From now on," President Truman continued, "man moves into a new era of destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Jade watched Betty Crocker watching the President and saw her unmistakable grin of glee as he went on.
"The speed of our scientific and technical progress over the last seven years shows no signs of abating," the President said. "We are being hurried forward, in our mastery of the atom, from one discovery to another, toward yet unforeseeable peaks of destructive power."
Jade thought of the green-skinned monster with the flashing eyes, and of his impatience. He probably wasn't going to have to wait for much longer.
A week later, Jade found Halley dead in his doghouse next to a half-eaten bowl of food. It smelled sweet instead of just like dog food, and when she turned towards the house with tear-filled eyes, she saw Betty Crocker standing at the back door and watching her, hip cocked and eyebrows raised with amusement.
"He was an old dog," she commented.
"You put antifreeze in his food!" Jade yelled.
"Nonsense, Jade. I wish you would remove yourself from your fantasy world. You're not a child anymore," she said, carefully fixing her hair and adjusting her hairband. "Get that corpse out of my yard, I can already smell it stinking up the place. And be back in time for I Love Lucy."
Tears flowing freely from her eyes, Jade took her cardigan off and wrapped as much of Halley in it as she could manage. She was walking to the woods with the dead dog in her arms, the same five hundred and twenty seven steps to Pipe Lake she'd walked the past sixteen years.
"Jade!"
Halley's still warm body pressed close to her chest, she decided she wasn't going to go back home. She couldn't live a minute longer under the same roof with that monster.
"Jade!"
Jade stopped and turned around. John had caught up with her at a run and was now doubled over, panting. He was carrying a trowel Jade used for tending her garden. "I'm sorry," he squeezed out, and she saw that his glasses were misted over and that his face was wet with tears. "I'm so sorry."
"She poisoned him, John," she said. "He was a happy, healthy dog and she poisoned him. She's a monster."
"I know, I'm sorry," John repeated. "I was an idiot, I ignored everything you said. She—the way she sometimes talks to me, it's like I'm a bit of sick that she's stepped into. And you were right, Jade, you were right about the Martians," he sniffed, "and about Sassacre, he has these moments when he'll look at me and ask me who I am—I'm so sorry, Jade, I messed up."
"I know a place where we can bury him that he'll like," Jade said, blinking away her tears.
They dug a grave for Halley, half with the trowel and half with their hands, in a small elevated clearing in the woods between two yew trees. The ground was hard and frozen, and by the time that they were finished, Jade's arms and fingers were sore. She placed Halley, still wrapped in her cardigan, in the hole, and John began piling the soil back on with the trowel. Jade stood and watched him at work, the bitter January wind freezing against her tear-stained cheeks. When Halley was buried, she knelt next to John and helped him smooth the soil over the grave, patting it down with her palms.
"He was a good dog," said John, standing up. He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes on the corner of his jacket.
"He was my best friend," said Jade.
John replaced his glasses. He went to reach over to take Jade's hand, seemed to have a brief internal struggle, and then withdrew his hand. They stood for a while in silence as the wind whispered in the trees around them. Jade clenched and unclenched her fists, thinking.
When the first drops of rain began to fall, John started back towards the suburbs, and Jade reluctantly followed. "You should plant something for him here, in the spring," she told him. "Maybe foxglove, the one with the white flowers like his fur was."
"You'll be here in the spring, though," said John. "Won't you?" She said nothing. "Jade. Won't you?"
"You can't expect me to stay, after everything she's done. The world needs to know what Betty Crocker actually is and what she's planning to do. I have to find some way of showing people how terrible she is," said Jade.
"I don't want to be funny here, Jade, but do you think they'll believe a sixteen year old girl who tells them that Betty Crocker is a Martian bent on enslaving Earth?"
Jade cast him a sidelong glance. "I won't say it like that; they would probably lock me up. And you're right, it's hard to imagine that they'll believe me," she said. She hugged herself, trying to stave off the cold. All too soon, their house was in sight. "But they might believe the Crocker twins."
John gaped at her. "You expect me to come with you?"
"Yes!"
"No, Jade!" He stuck his arms in his trouser pockets and walked briskly forward. "I can't just up and leave."
"Why not? What could you possibly have left here that's worth anything?" Jade demanded.
They levelled with the house. The living room light was on. John took a moment to answer, busying himself with fishing the house keys out of his back pocket. "We're not the only ones who were hurt here," he said, clinking the keys together as they approached the front door. "I want to help Sassacre and make sure he's okay. He's a great comedian, Jade, and I want to be as great as him! I can't just leave him with her."
"I suppose you're right," said Jade, eyes downcast.
John unlocked the door and stepped over the threshold. Jade could hear the sounds of the television coming from the living room. It was the episode of I Love Lucy in which she gave birth. The statistics would later say that 71.1% of all television sets in the United States were tuned in to the programme. It was currently the commercial break, and Jade could hear her stepmother's voice coming from the television, saying, "I'm Betty Crocker, and I promise you a perfect cake every time you bake. That's right, perfect! You be the judge. Or write Betty Crocker, Maple Valley, Washington, and get your money back."
"You sure?" John asked.
"I can't go back in there," she said.
He nodded, and then pulled her in for a hug. "I'll miss you," he said. Jade wasn't crying only because her eyes felt entirely dried up after crying for Halley.
"I'll miss you too," she said. "Don't let her get to you."
"I promise!" John said.
"John?" Betty called from the living room. "You're letting Old Man Winter in! Close the door!"
"Yes, ma'am," said John. "Wait here," he mouthed to Jade, and went all the way inside, closing the door behind him.
He reappeared on the upstairs window a few moments later, holding a full duffel bag. "Packed you," he whispered, and threw the bag down. It landed next to Jade with a soft thump. She picked it up, nodded at him and started walking away.
John waved at her and stayed watching her from the window. When she got to the corner of their street, Jade turned for the last time and waved. He waved back, and when she blinked twice to stop her eyes blurring over with tears, he had already disappeared and shut the window. She knew that she would never see him again.