Chapter One

You were named Falling Star to fulfill the prophesy made about you by your ancestors who sit beside the Great Spirit and the White Giants in round lodges on the other side of the moon.

PAPA EAGLE FEATHER’S words echoed in Star’s mind, as if her head were inside an oil drum and the syllables were bouncing off the metal, repeating.

Falling Star … star … star …

Ancient name … name … name …

Great Spirit … spirit … spirit …

And the White Giants.

Falling Star Yellowhorse had dreamed about the white giants, huge and bald, with blue eyes and expressionless faces, wearing those dress things like you see on statues … togas, the short ones that didn’t go all the way to the floor. They weren’t scary looking, just horrifying in their strangeness, the way they looked like people, sort of, but distorted people.

She’d dreamed about the silver balls hanging in the sky, too. And the others, the monster creatures with too many bug legs and razor teeth that looked like they’d been invented just to scare people, like for a horror movie.

But this wasn’t a dream.

Star kept her eyes shut, resolutely refused to open them. Even as she thought that, squeezed her eyelids so tightly closed it wrinkled up her whole face, she understood it was being a baby, like hiding under the covers. She was blind — couldn’t have seen anything if she had opened her eyes, but there was a symbolism in keeping her eyes closed that she intuitively understood and acknowledged.

Still — not seeing something didn’t make it go away.

And Star wanted this to go away. All of it. Every single day since the Astral Telescope spotted the little white spots lined up in neat rows out by Jupiter. After that, everything was ruined.

Cities burned, governments collapsed and people — that was the most horrible part of all — normal people changed. Uncle Clyde would probably say they hadn’t changed, they’d just became who they’d really been all along. Either way, the result was the same. You couldn’t just assume that people would be good and kind and decent anymore. You were in danger … everywhere.

Oh, how Star wanted a do-over! Wanted to wake up in the morning and smell bacon frying, and hear Pumpkin whining because he needed to go to the bathroom really bad and the littles squabbling over some toy.

Life. She wanted it back. Life where she wasn’t so scared she was nauseous, trying not to throw up. So scared her heart wasn’t beating at all, it was humming in her chest.

Could you die from that? From your heart beating too fast, from the blood squirting around so fast it didn’t have time to do whatever it was blood did that kept you alive?

Pumpkin was leaned against her leg, trembling. No, vibrating. She dropped to her knees, threw her arms around the dog, buried her face in his fur, so soft he felt like a stuffed animal, and wanted so badly to cry.

Her knees had landed on something hard. It wasn’t sand. She’d been standing in sand and she wasn’t anymore, which meant she wasn’t where she had been, on the mesa that looked out over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.

She was somewhere else. And she knew where else, the only where else she could be. That understanding scared her so bad she couldn’t even cry. She stopped in the middle of a sob and sucked in a trembling gasp of air, clinging so tight to Pumpkin she was almost choking him.

What was she going to do?

No, that wasn’t the right question. The right question was what was she going to be? Papa Eagle Feather had told her she had to be brave. Uncle Clyde would want her to be brave, too. Only she couldn’t think about Uncle Clyde. The image flashed on the screen in her mind, anyway, showed up hot and stinking and it was too powerful to resist.

She’s cuddled up beside Uncle Clyde under the trailer house, her arms around him, hugging him, but he isn’t hugging her back. He isn’t moving at all and as she lies there she feels the wetness on the front of his shirt dry and grow stiff, feels his body grow cold.

Star pushed the image and the wave of overwhelming grief away with a shuddery intake of breath. She didn’t cry, though. That was something, made her feel a little like the brave girl Papa Eagle Feather had told her to be.

Thinking about Papa Eagle Feather didn’t hurt like thinking of Uncle Clyde because he wasn’t dead. Just gone. She felt loss, of course. Loneliness. But mostly what she felt was confused. He had taken her and Pumpkin up to the top of the mesa and told her that she was standing in the Taking Place, that the gods had foretold she would one day stand there, and that they would take her away.

And it had happened. She had been taken away.

All those thoughts — dozens of thoughts! — flew through Star’s head in seconds. Either that, or time stood still long enough for her to think them all slowly, ponder each one, and she didn’t believe that was it. She had thought it all — about the dreams and the giants and Uncle Clyde and the mountaintop — between the time her grandfather let go of her hands and stepped away and the beam had enveloped her in golden light.

She saw the light. She was blind, but she saw it. It was sparkling, like it was made of gold glitter. But it had texture somehow, which made no sense but it was true anyway. It felt like you could reach out your fingers and rub it between them and if you did, it would feel like velvet.

And then the golden light was gone but there was still light. She was blind, but not black-dark blind. She saw lights and blobs of shapes and bright colors. What she saw now through her closed eyelids was not warm, golden light. It was white light, bright and sterile, the kind of light that might shine down on an operating table so some surgeon could see where to cut you open.

It was cold light, too. And it didn’t feel like it was coming from above, like the golden beam had felt. It was from all around, from everywhere and nowhere.

But she didn’t open her eyes to see because she’d finally gotten all the way out to the end of herself, out to the boundaries you set up so you don’t have to know a thing if you don’t want to. And she didn’t want to, not yet. She wasn’t ready yet.

Her grandfather had taken her and Pumpkin up to the top of the mesa, said a bunch of weird stuff and then stepped away. Then she’d felt/seen the golden glow. And after that, harsh white light.

And silence.

All sound was suddenly gone, too. Gone was the gentle rustle of the sagebrush and the lonely cry of a chicken hawk high in the sky.

No smells, either. The scent of the flowering cactus and the leather of Papa Eagle Feather’s vest, and the horse smell that was just a part of who he was. Every smell was gone.

Like maybe she was in a test tube.

She forced herself to loosen her strangle-hold hug around Pumpkin’s neck. He was trembling but he wasn’t whining like he did during thunderstorms, which terrified him. He wasn’t afraid. He was … something else. Confused. Disoriented. Bewildered, maybe.

Star knew why. He was trembling because he could see what she couldn’t. He could see where they were, while she was just guessing. But it was a pretty safe guess even if it was crazy, bull moose crazy.

Mescalero Apache Indian girls from Roswell, New Mexico, didn’t get abducted by aliens! Not in real life. In stupid science fiction movies, or in the minds of wack jobs who believed there were little green men living in Area 51.

But not for real.

What were you supposed to do when “for real” was impossible?

She bleated a burp of some sound that was almost like a laugh. It wasn’t, not a sob, either. Something in between. She put her hand on the surface where she was kneeling. It was cool and smooth. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said it was plastic but she didn’t imagine Astral spaceships were made of plastic.

The last wall fell then, with the feel of that smooth, cold surface, and terror gripped her chest so tight she couldn’t get her breath. Crazy or not, impossible or not, this-doesn’t-happen-to-real-people or not, Falling Star Yellowhorse was up in one of the alien spaceships, the silver balls she’d seen in her dreams hanging over cities, suspended in space. Up there with the white giants. And the black lizard things with razor teeth.

Pumpkin might not be afraid, but Star was terrified, so frightened it felt like there were leather straps around her chest so tight she had trouble drawing in a breath.

She had never in all her eleven years been as frightened as she was right now. Oh, she’d been scared when the crazy man who’d killed Uncle Clyde came back to kill her, too. She was afraid to die. Everybody was afraid to die. Now, though, she was afraid to live. Afraid of what the white giants and lizard things were going to do to her. They were aliens. Things, not people. And they’d taken her away, kidnapped her, brought her here — for what?

Whatever they intended to do to her, it wouldn’t be good. It would be horrible, maybe so horrible she would wish Papa Eagle Feather hadn’t saved her from the man who was trying to kill her. It might be so terrible that being dead was better than being alive … here.

A full-body shudder wracked her like a seizure and she clung to Pumpkin. But she wasn’t crying. It wasn’t crying if you didn’t make any noise. Her shoulders shook and tears somehow found a way to run out of her eyes and down her cheeks.

She didn’t open them, though. Kept her eyes squeezed tight shut.