The telephone rang like it intended to rattle the teeth out of her skull. Sydney flinched awake, half-tangled in a thin government blanket, desert cool still clinging to the room. She lay there a heartbeat longer, counting the pause between each metallic trill the way she counted seconds between lightning and thunder as a girl, then groped the nightstand for the receiver.

  “Billings,” she said, voice dry as the gypsum dust that coated everything in New Mexico.

  A clipped male voice cut in. “No ‘proper greeting of the day’? They don’t teach you manners over there, do they?”

  “It’s too early for this, and I’m not one of your little boys playing soldier. What do you want?” She sat up now, pulse quickened.

  “Miss Billings, one of your balloons is down. We think you need to come take a look at this.”

  “Why?” Sydney laid her head back on the pillow. “Just launch one of the backups.” She gripped the phone, preparing to end the call.

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me. You’re needed immediately.”

  “It can wait until daylight,” she said, eyes closed, already picturing a tear on a barbed fence. “It’s a radiosonde, not the Manhattan Project.”

  “Negative, ma’am. Get dressed, now. Brass is inbound. A jeep is on route to you. Please, be ready, Miss Billings.” The line went dead, and she sat back up.

  She stared at the receiver a moment longer, then slammed it back onto its cradle hard enough to make the lamp wobble.

  “Damn Army,” she muttered, already swinging her legs over the cot. The floorboards were cold. Somewhere beyond the thin walls of the civilian annex, a generator coughed to life and caught, sending a steady vibration through the building. This place wakes early because this base never sleeps.

  She pulled on the first clean blouse she could find, buttoned it wrong, cursed, and tried again. Trousers. The men always made a point of looking at them, at her, when she wore them. Practical beat pretty; the desert didn’t care for skirts.

  No lipstick or makeup. It only smudged on dust. She jammed her hair into a barrette, then dug a comb through the stubborn bits that had sprung loose during sleep.

  By the time she shrugged into her jacket, the crunch of tires and a brief flash of headlamps cut across the blinds. Right on time. She snatched her satchel — notebooks, slide rule, a battered copy of ‘Celestial Mechanics’ that made men blink — and stepped into the cold.

  The desert air curled and pitched, scattering dust.

  Her driver was barely old enough to shave. He didn’t look at her when she climbed in. Hands at ten and two, jaw set, the way boys hold themselves when they want to be mistaken for men. She’d wondered how long he’d been awake for, or if he’d received a call for action before she had.

  “Morning,” Sydney offered, settling into the passenger seat. The vehicle lurched back, turning into the street, then sped down the way. “Where are we headed?”

  “The East Hangar,” he said, eyes front.

  The wind whipped, Sydney's hair danced in her face, and she struggled to tame it.

  “Hanger 84? I’ve never had anything launched from there, why are we going all the way out there?”

  “Ma’am, I was told to collect you.” His eyes stayed on the road, as the jeep hung a sharp left.

  “You were told not to talk,” she translated, and he didn’t deny it.

  The jeep rolled on, tires whispering on powder-fine chalk. Roswell Army Air Field unfolded in dun shapes and hard edges — long, low barracks with blacked-out windows; mess halls exhaling coffee steam; the rigid spine of the control tower punching at the paling sky.

  Floodlights chased shadows across the runways, catching B-29 bellies with a sheet-metal shine and glinting on the curved noses of C-47s queued like cattle along the apron. Somewhere a bugle tried to find reveille and gave up; a corporal laughed; a door slammed; a dog barked. The smell was oil and dust and something metallic that never washed out of your clothes.

  They passed two MPs posted under a sign that told you what you already knew: you were in the Army’s house. The MPs stared at the jeep, stared at her, and didn’t bother to hide it. Sydney was used to that particular head-tilt, the ‘you’re a curiosity look’, and met it with the expression she wore like a second uniform. Bored. Unbothered. I’m supposed to be here; her daily mantra.

  She wasn’t, not really. She belonged to Calibre, to CP&T. She was “attached,” “seconded,” “on loan,” words that meant she could be useful without ever truly being welcome. It kept her closer to the instruments and farther from the club. She preferred machines to men.

  The jeep braked at the yawning mouth of a hangar, a dark crescent rimmed in light. Unusual for pre-dawn: too many men, too much noise. Inside, a forklift belched and maneuvered with the delicacy of a drunk rhinoceros. A coffee urn steamed on a crate beside a stack of parachute bags. The smell shifted here — rubber, hot metal, the sweet bitterness of boiled grounds.

  The young driver finally glanced her way. “You’re going to find them up there,” ahead the lights were bright, wishing the hanger. “Inside. Captain Hays and Lieutenant Colonel Easley, they’re waiting for you, ma’am.” He swallowed. “Good luck.”

  “Luck is for gamblers,” Sydney said, climbing out. “I brought a slide rule.” She laughed, a short chuckle, and grinned. The soldier didn’t laugh.

  Two MPs took her in, name, badge, a brief frisk that found nothing but pencils, and waved her through. Inside the hangar, everything was motion. Airmen in coveralls hunched over clipboards. A sergeant barked something about the perimeter, and two privates sprinted to roll out a line of sawhorses that would keep the curious curious. A mechanic in greasy dungarees cradled a crescent wrench like a rosary. You could measure a place by the way it breathed; RAAF breathed through its machinery.

  Across the room, Sydney saw the debris. Even under a hastily thrown canvas, it owned the floor. Canvas peeled back like a bandage, the thing beneath waiting to be named. Yes, there were a few strips of silvered balloon material, the wrinkled mylar catching light like the skin of a fish. But those were scraps, a garnish.

  What swallowed the space was something else: a tube of metal too smooth to be aircraft aluminum, curved sections like a fuselage without seams, a lattice that appeared lacy at first glance and then revealed no rivets, no bolts, no logic she recognized. The edges were not torn, or bent, so much as… re-decided: the way a soap bubble collapses into another shape without ever appearing to break.

  “Miss Billings,” a voice at her shoulder. A man in an officer’s cap that he held instead of wore, his hair was sleep-mussed; his tie crooked; his eyes held that peculiar mix of alertness and exhaustion that command bred. “Captain Hays. This is Major Marcel.” He motioned to the man standing over his right shoulder. “You’ll pardon the hour, I’m sure?”

  “You’re forgiven if this turns out to be interesting,” Sydney said, already moving toward the metal.

  “Interesting is one way to put it,” Hays chortled.

  The men followed, then Marcel asked, “What all do you make of it?” His expression was stern, fixed on the object and scraps. “I was there—at the impact and crash site. I couldn’t get a good look then, but now—” He wiped something from his brow.

  “Well, it’s not ours, that’s for damn sure,” she said, kneeling, her satchel thumping the concrete. Her fingers hovered, then touched. Cold. Not the chill of the hangar; the cold of a creek-stone in winter. She pressed harder. The sheen flexed, not quite giving, not quite resisting, like skin stretched over a bone. She felt, absurdly, that if she waited, it might warm to her, as if metal had a preferred owner.

  “Soviet?” Hays offered, the word sitting on his tongue like a cigar he wasn’t supposed to smoke.

  “Has to be.” Marcel rubbed his chin and glanced at Hays from the corner of his eye. “Bet they’ve got eyes and ears on Mogul. Maybe they tested something and we grabbed the tail of it.”

  Sydney didn’t look up. “The metallurgical profile on Soviet airframes is not this century,” she said, conversationally. “And if they had a bomber that looked like this,” her arms spread across the debris field, “they wouldn’t be sneaking it over New Mexico on a Tuesday. They’d be somewhere impactful, like Times Square.”

  Hays’ mouth twitched. “So you’re saying—”

  “I’m saying ‘I don’t know yet’.” She leaned until her nose almost touched the surface. The reflection that came back wasn’t quite hers, the light smudged the planes of her face, turned her eyes darker, made her look like a stranger. She rapped on the metal with a knuckle. The sound was damped, as if the metal were swallowing it. “I want samples. Chemical analysis. Tensile. The whole nine yards.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” Marcel removed a rucksack from his shoulders, placing it on the ground between them; his eyes looking over the soldiers maintaining the perimeter. “Like I said, I was out there.” He looked back over his shoulder, then at Hays, before he beckoned towards the satchel.

  Sydney glanced down at the bag, then at the two gentlemen. Inside was more debris— smaller sheets of materials that were thin, but highly durable and cold to the touch.

  “That was at the impact site. And that,” he pointed to the larger metallic tube, “was recovered from the crash site. I think Easley wants us to go back out there to see what else we can find.”

  “You and the rest of Intel can have a dance with a Geiger counter while I get my samples.” She stood. Dust ghosted off her knees, leaving clean crescents on the concrete. “I don’t take orders from RAAF command. By the way, where’s the rest of the balloon?”

  Hays gestured at two crates of embarrassment. “That’s it. It was at the impact site. Sensors showed it was offline, so we scrambled. The patrol picked up a little extra.” His gaze slid back to the largest piece, resting like a beached whale. “So, hold on. You’re telling me it’s not ours and it’s not theirs. That leaves—”

  “It leaves us not knowing.” Sydney kept her voice flat. She enjoyed keeping men’s appetites on a leash. “Which is why you dragged me out of bed, Captain.”

  Hays’ jaw worked. “You’ll have a work table there.” He pointed. “The lab’s not set up, so make do. I want your preliminary report by noon.”

  “Then you should have called me yesterday.” She started walking to her new designated area, and he let her. She felt his eyes glued to her backside.

  #

  Her table was a scavenged door across sawhorses. Someone had done her the courtesy of lining up a few instruments: a loupe, a magnet that would be embarrassed to be called a magnet, a caliper with a sticky hinge, a scale missing a pan. Nothing sophisticated, though the base was equipped for atomic research; Marcel’s intel teams handled that. She set her satchel down and took inventory like a quartermaster, telling herself that irritation burned calories and she’d be svelte by lunchtime. Then she pulled on a pair of thin cotton gloves and went back to the metal like a pilgrim returns to a shrine.

  She worked, which, for Sydney, was church: breath even, hands steady, mind cutting a grid over chaos and labeling where it could. She tried to slice slivers along the most conventional-looking edges unsuccessfully, attempting to collect filings into paper envelopes she labeled in an unbreakable hand. When she pressed too hard, the edge did not burr; it decided to be a new edge. That made the little hairs on her forearms lift.

  Around her, RAAF continued being RAAF. A sergeant cursed a fuel line. Somewhere a phonograph, contraband, no doubt, spun a Benny Goodman record at a quarter volume, notes dribbling out like secrets. The coffee urn emptied. New MPs took the door. The base’s morning shifted from night crew to day crew like a snake changing skins. And through it all, men watched her watch the metal.

  She felt them and ignored them with the same muscle. All of her movements were methodical. Systematically, she sorted all the pieces into piles organized by composition, making her way to the main body of the craft. Sydney looked at her time, the whole process being very intimate to her.

  “You’re quiet,” Hays said. He’d drifted back after lunch. He had a tin mug, the contents of which were even darker. None of it was offered to Sydney. “Makes me nervous. Someone on this planet is capable of constructing something like this, and we’ve been kept out in the dark. I guess that’s why they put together outfits like yours, huh?”

  There was a faint smirk on her face, very briefly, then back to stoicism. “I could narrate,” Sydney said, pencil scratching over a page as she mapped a cross-section she couldn’t truly prove existed. “But I find men do better when I don’t tell them things they’ll only repeat badly later.”

  He snorted despite himself. His legs slowly inched to the edge of the sawhorse. “So. Could it be German? One of those V-something rockets? Definitely big enough to be.”

  Sydney stopped writing. She wanted to convey words of a more serious tone, but needed to keep her voice low. “If the Germans had this,” she said, “London would be a crater. And if the Russians had it, Berlin would have been theirs without a single shot. Think about it: why now? The wars are over, Captain, remember? So why screw up and reveal something like this, now?” She tapped the page with her pencil. “It’s not one of ours. It’s not any one of theirs. It’s…” She searched for a word that didn’t sound like lunacy. “Ahead.”

  “Ahead? Ahead of what—who?” Hays gripped the sawhorse.

  “Everyone.”

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  Hays stood there a moment, then drained his cup, tossing his head back. “Bottoms up.” Exhaling contentedly, “I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

  Alone again, ‘left to it’, Sydney the scientist yielded a sliver to Sydney the girl with a telescope on a Los Angeles rooftop. She remembered the grit under her knees, the way the city glowed like an ember, the great smear of the Milky Way before the warehouse lights strangled it. She remembered her grandfather’s hands, ink-stained and gentle, guiding hers to the eyepiece. Look, he’d said, and she had — not just at stars but through them, a child’s gaze burning holes in the sky.

  They will laugh at you, and then they will need you. Her mother had said when she chose Berkeley over a husband. Just don’t let the first part sour the second. It had, a little. Men’s laughter left a film.

  There was a clatter beside her, and a tray rested near her. “Miss Billings. Coffee. Captain’s orders.” Another boy, red-eared, maybe the age of the driver. His eyes didn’t rise to meet hers.

  “Thank you,” she said, and meant it, grasping the cup with both hands and taking a deep gulp; not too hot and a little sweet. “Did you make this? It’s good. Corporal, what’s your name?”

  The airman was caught off guard, stammering to remember the answer. “Uh—Murphy, ma’am. Thank you!” His eyes stayed locked dead ahead of him, on the debris.

  “Murphy, let me ask you a question. What do you see when you look at that?” She nodded toward the hull curve. She didn’t really care for his opinion; she cared to hear what he would dare to say.

  He shifted his weight, tilting his head as so he didn’t break rank. “Looks… impractical, ma’am. Maybe a little inconvenient.”

  She turned back to the scattered parts, and the remaining fuselage. “Oh? How so?”

  “Well, at first glance, it looks big. It would be comfortable for a large person, but…” He looked around and stepped closer to the scientist. “I was one of the men that brought it back. It was open—we didn’t close it. For sure something was in it. Something was out there with us, it had to be; might still be. And, there’s the damage.” He was quiet now. “A lot of the pieces, they weren’t ‘broken off’ like from a crash. Yeah, it crashed, we think it may have crashed a couple of times, but those parts seemed more removed, then anything. I think it was under repair when we got there. I don’t know.”

  She smiled, her teeth bare brightly. “That’s better than what your captain offered.”

  Murphy colored, half-pleased and afraid he’d be caught pleased. “Begging pardon, ma’am?”

  “Do you have sisters, Murphy?”

  “Two, ma’am.”

  “Then you’ll do fine.” She sent him off with the empty tray and a little of her armor put away.

  #

  By nine, the hangar had found a rhythm. The forklifts respected the taped lines now. The MPs rotated in practiced twenty-minute blocks. A pair of men in suits materialized, the kind of men whose haircuts were a rank of their own, and radiated the particular authority of people who didn’t carry rifles because their words did the shooting. One of them watched Sydney. When she looked back, he changed which part of the building he found interesting.

  She stepped away from the table to clear her head. Moving cleared thinking: her father had taught her that with chess; her mother with waltz. She made a slow circuit of the wreckage, measuring scale with her body: she could have laid herself head-to-toe twelve times along the largest curve and not reached the end. No visible scorch marks. Impact points that read more like… carves, as if a child had pressed a spoon into cake.

  At the far edge of the cordon, she stopped. A crate had been dragged too near the line, and on it a private had abandoned a sandwich half-wrapped in wax paper. The sandwich had sweated itself into inedibility. She took the wax paper — not the sandwich — and used it to test the way light bounced off the metal through a translucent medium. The light scattered. Then it gathered and returned, as if the metal had considered it and decided to keep what it liked.

  When she glanced up, she saw something that wasn’t light. A soldier moved where one shouldn’t be. Not beyond the MPs, with the officers, not among the forklifts. Between. In the seams of the hangar’s attention, where only an entity who knew how to look would look. He — she thought it a he at first glance — slid between a scaffolding strut and a coiled hose with the self-conscious care of someone new to a body. Wrong cadence. Wrong posture. Wrong boots: too new, too clean, at least for the desert. New soldiers rarely rotated into the RAAF.

  Sydney let her gaze drift past him as if she hadn’t noticed and kept moving along the wreckage, but a prickle started behind her ears. It took time, but eventually she’d learned to trust that prickle more than any memo. It had made professors wary and colleagues jealous. She came around the curve of the largest piece and peered into a shadowed triangle of space where the metal and floor made a crawlway. The soldier was there now, closer than he had any right to be, head tipped as if listening to something in the metal. The scientists’ next breath stalled; the profile that turned, just enough to catch light, was not a boy’s. It was a woman’s.

  Suspicions mounted. The only woman supposed to be in this hangar was Sydney. Her heart did a peculiar double-step — shock but also a feeling of vindication. She didn’t call out; instead, she tightened her grip on her satchel until the clasp bit her palm and, skillfully, relocated; slipping out of sight.

  She walked, her pace measured — the way she moved always calculated, sliding past the crowd through the spaces where nobody could see her, popping up behind the soldier.

  “Soldier,” she said, the word precise as a ruler. “You’re out of bounds.”

  There was no jump of alarm, or evidence of startle. The figure turned fully, tall and looming; wrong, in the slightest of ways. Their uniform fit wrong in several directions. The face under the cap was… symmetrical the way art was symmetrical, not the way people were. And the eyes — the eyes pinned her like specimens, cataloging as they pleaded you not to notice they were cataloging. Up close, Sydney saw it: not a smear of engine grease where it should be, no sweat where it should be, and a stillness in the way she held herself like a machine waiting for a command.

  “Who are you? Name, rank?” Sydney asked, and her voice came out calmer than she felt. “What’s your unit?”

  The woman’s mouth opened, then closed on an answer that weighed itself and found a safer shape. When she spoke, the English arrived in clean pieces, as if borrowed.

  “Name.” The woman’s head cocked to the side. “Rank. Unit.”

  Sydney took a step back and looked around. What kind of response was that? It’s like she speaks the language but doesn’t know what the words mean? She steadied her stance, regaining her ground. “Yes. That’s the gist of what I asked you. What are you doing here? This is a restricted—“

  “I am here for that.” The woman pointed past Sydney. “I need to obtain it.”

  Answers, but not all of them.

  “That’s not all that I asked you.” She stepped closer to the woman in a move of intimidation. It was ineffective.

  The woman’s focus was back on Sydney, her expression was blank.

  “Name. Rank. Unit.”

  “Yes. That’s what I—“

  “I cannot produce those answers.” The woman stepped toward Sydney, then passed her, stopping just beyond Sydney’s shoulder. “That is mine. It must be reacquired.”

  The woman’s close proximity made Sydney anxious. She was bigger than she’d seemed before. Taller than any woman Sydney had ever encountered. At least 7 feet, yet her voice was soft and calculated. Curiosity made her cut her head, locking eyes with the strange woman. They were cold, dead, lifeless orbs, almost painted on.

  What kind of mind games were these? Sydney produced three courses of action: (1) shout for an MP now, potentially resulting in a physical altercation; (2) probe for more information, then turn her into base personnel at a later, safer time; (3) probe for more information, then turn her in to her chain of command, leaving the government out of the equation. She took a moment and conceived of a fourth course of action, one that might benefit her a little more directly.

  “What do you know about that thing?” she said, flicking her chin toward the debris. She shot a quick glance at the officers, the suits, and other men with notebooks pretending to be experts. She’d wondered if they’d noticed she was gone. Would they come looking for her?

  The woman’s gaze flicked to the hull and back. “Enough,” she said softly. “More than any you will ever meet. None of you will fully comprehend what it is.” Her words were slow, almost forced, like she couldn’t anticipate them before saying them; nonetheless, she was clear and coherent.

  Sydney felt her throat grow dry and throttled a cough. There it was again, the prickle. She made her face into something Hays had called insubordinate on several occasions, dropping her voice to the register men’s ears often skipped. “What is that supposed to mean? I asked you what - I didn’t ask you how much—“

  “Enough is efficient. You would know that if you knew what it was. It’s mine, that will be sufficient.”

  ”I’m going to need proof.” Sydney’s voice was a hushed bark. “If you want this thing, then you’ll have to tell me a little more than that.” She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed them talking. “You have one more chance, or I’ll call all the real soldiers over here. I can’t help ghosts, and I won’t be anybody’s fool.” Sydney’s expression was now stern, sealing her promise with a blink.

  Nodding in agreement, the strange woman also blinked. “Agreed, proof can be provided.”

  Sydney wrestled with the impulse to call an MP.

  Through the progressing day, the hangar’s noise receded to a hum; it seemed to shrink around them, though nothing in it had changed. The forklifts rumbled; sergeants shouted for privates to fetch clamps; metal clanged against concrete. Yet in the narrow wedge of shadow where Sydney stood with the strange soldier, everything was drawn tight and small, as though she’d stepped inside the moment between a trigger squeeze and the bullet’s flight.

  The woman didn’t fidget, didn’t shift weight the way even the most seasoned soldier did when they’d been caught somewhere they shouldn’t be. She simply stood, posture erect but off somehow — like she’d memorized the stance without ever having carried a rifle in her life.

  Though she wasn’t currently enlisted or commissioned, Sydney did her time with the US Army. This person was nothing like the people she’d served with in Germany, or any other European military. They were rigid, but not this stiff.

  “So, what can you tell me about that thing? Who sent you?” Sydney asked directly, her voice pitched low.

  The woman’s eyes flicked to the great arc of wreckage behind Sydney, then back. “Allegiance mandated.” The words were careful, each syllable weighed. “Confirm allegiance. Further detail will follow.”

  Sydney felt irritation sharpen, turning to face the woman fully. “Confirm allegiance? Who talks like this? I don’t think you understand — you’re in no position to make demands.” Her voice was a little louder now. “You want allegiance? For what?” Her hands were on her hips. “Give me something to align with.”

  The woman tilted her head again, considering. “The circumstances’ gravity is immense. Summarizations are insufficient. Parameters prioritize safety; procedural protocols limit access to sensitive information. Allegiance must be confirmed, then validated.”

  The accent wasn’t quite right. Not Russian, nor Czech, or anything Sydney could pin down. She’d spent two years in Europe. This voice carried something else, an odd smoothness, like the words had been ironed before they reached her.

  Sydney took a step closer, her heart hammering but her face iron-flat. “Do you know where you are right now?” Sydney’s eyes narrowed. “You’re standing in the middle of the most secure hangar in New Mexico, arguably the United States, possibly the world! This is the home of the 509th bomber group, the same team that dropped the bombs in the war; the world’s most advanced research and development teams — and the home of many of America’s secrets. You shouldn’t be here. We’re talking about something you shouldn’t even know exists. You’ve got ten seconds to give me a reason not to call two MPs over here to get the answers I want.”

  The woman’s gaze didn’t waver. Her face, mood, entire demeanor was unbothered, unchanged by the threats. “You want to know what it is,” she said softly. “You want to know, and if you do that, it will never be so.”

  Sydney froze. The words threading through her chest to the part of her she kept wrapped in sarcasm and cigarettes. You want to know. It was true. It was the reason she’d stayed here all day, no breaks. The questions staked, with no answers in sight. This was nothing like anything she’d ever seen, or been taught about.

  She swallowed. “What is it then?”

  The woman stepped closer, just enough that Sydney caught a faint scent that didn’t belong on this base; not sweat, oil, or dust. Something metallic, faintly sweet, like ozone after lightning. Their eyes were locked.

  “It is not a balloon. Not a bomber. It’s not Soviet, or German, or American. It’s different.” Sydney’s throat was dry. “Different how? Tell me. Where does it come from?”

  The woman’s attention shifted to officers across the way, the suits pretending not to hover, the MPs shifting at the doors. “Confirm allegiance.”

  “Alright, done. I swear allegiance. What is it?”

  “No. Confirm allegiance— ”

  “Alright! Allegiance confirmed! Tell me…”

  “No. Confirm allegiance.

  “I did! Just now. Did you not just hear me?”

  “Not like that.”

  “Then how?”

  “Help me move it. Then the safety parameter protocol will be complete.”

  Sydney’s mind reeled. Treason. That’s what this was, plain as a poster. She pictured Hays’ face if she dragged this woman by the elbow across the hangar, shouting for guards. He’d beam, slap her on the back, call her “the good kind of civilian.” She’d be safe, loyal, folded neatly into her role. CP&T might even reward her, or punish her for not bringing the woman directly to them.

  Another image played in her head: Cedric, ink-stained fingers on a telescope, eyes alight with a discovery no one wanted. Cedric; laughed at, ruined, dragging his family west while whispers nipped at his heels. Was she following in his footsteps? Her grandfather died, shamed by the scientific community. Sydney had always warned her not to be like him. But God, how she loved him, and longed to see something no one had ever fathomed before, like him.

  She stepped back, pulse racing. “You’re right. There are too many eyes and ears here. This is too out in the open, but there may be another way.” Sydney looked around, unsure of what she was about to do, but a plan was slowly forming. “It’s scheduled for transport,” she heard herself say, voice quiet again. “After I give my preliminary review, I’m to notify the Officer of the Day so that he can initiate the next step. It’s going to be transported to another location for further observations. Muroc Army Air Base in Southern California. That will be our best chance.”

  The woman’s face remained the same, but her posture softened with relief or gratitude.

  “I can go and give that report now, if you’ll hang tight. I’ll go make the call and get the ball rolling.”

  “Hang tight. Tight.”

  “Stay here. Remain out of sight, unless you’re prepared to answer harder questions from one of them.”

  Sydney turned, retreating through the hangar, toward the side office. Inside the walls were a sterile green. The window had been tinted, painting the room in another shade of green. The desk sat adjacent, covered in dusty binders and a black rotary phone.

  The phone weighed heavy in her palm as she dialed. “Patch me through to CP&T, secured line please.” There was an acknowledgment, then a request for credentials which Sydney rattled off. “Calibre HQ, executives, please. It’s urgent.” she whispered when the operator patched her through. It took time for another person to speak. The voices always seemed identical to her, with hers being the most distinct — in part because she was the only woman.

  “Executive Billings. We’ve been expecting your call. We’d heard there may have been some sort of attack on RAAF last night? One of your balloons was shot down? Status report.”

  “Yes, well that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. Something may be underway, as the situation has changed since then. I need clearance for additional field work.”

  “Not the whole truth? The base communications are monitored live; that’s the most recent report we’ve received. That word came straight from the army.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s the most recent information. I’m telling you, something big may be happening. Something they don’t know about.”

  “But you do?”

  “Listen, I’m trying to give you the first scoop. Isn’t that why I’m here? You wanted a front-row seat when the Soviets decided to drop a payload, so you propped me up here, and I may be onto something big. Bigger than the Soviets.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Grant me clearance for additional field work.”

  "We’ve talked about this. You have the least amount of field training; that’s not a smart idea. Report what you’ve got, one of us will come and take over from here.”

  Always the same excuse. No, she wasn’t a grunt, but a soldier all the same. She needed to turn the fire up a notch.

  “It’s a safe assignment, Executive, I assure you. Let me prove my worth. Waiting for a handoff; this catch might slip away. This is well worth it, but time is of the essence. I’m in a good position right now.” She needed to sell it. “I may have uncovered a spy, they have a device here. The one that fell that this particular individual is very much obsessed with. I can hand-deliver them both to you.”

  The man let out a long breath. “It’s safe? You’re not going to wander into another firefight, or get your cover blown?”

  “It’s just a simple escort. I already have the person in my custody, but they won’t talk unless they trust me, it seems. Once I have the facts, you’ll know where to find us. I’ll keep you informed every step of the way.”

  “Alright. What’s the catch?”

  “I need you to arrange to have the wreckage moved. We can arrange to have it sent to Muroc, out in California. From there, I’m sure we can arrange to have it transported further. Do I have clearance?”

  The voice thought for a long moment, sighed, then gave a cold reply: “You have a green light. Observe. Report everything. We will notify the base to prepare the wreckage to be relocated. But I am only clearing ground transport. No aircraft.”

  Sydney set the receiver down, palms slick. When she stepped back into the hangar, the strange soldier was waiting exactly where she’d left her, as if time had paused for both of them. Sydney forced her face into calm neutrality.

  “All right,” she said. “It’s been arranged. The plan is in motion.” The words tasted like rust, but even as she said them, excitement leapt in her chest. Fear, yes, but curiosity stronger still. For the first time since the call had dragged her out of bed, Sydney Billings felt awake. “We need to lay low until they’re ready to transport everything. Sydney’s eyes trained back to the woman. “I didn’t catch your name. Mine’s Sydney. Sydney Billings,” she reached out for a handshake.

  The woman’s eyes studied the hand, making no gesture towards it. She looked back at Sydney, then back down to the hand.

  “Lil’lah is what I’m called,” reaching her arm out beside Sydney’s, their two hands never touching.