Chapter One

Falling Star Yellowhorse sat up, panting, gasping for breath. She looked around frantically, unable to remember where she was or how she had gotten there. All she knew was that she was terrified of the black orb she had seen behind her eyelids. It was gone now that her eyes were open but the fear was still there. It hammered away in her chest like some Chinese gong. No, not a gong — gongs were slow and deliberate. Her heart was a timpani drum, fast and light, beating so rapidly she couldn’t imagine how the beats could be shoving blood through her veins. Squirting though her body that fast, wouldn’t a valve blow somewhere, and spew blood out from the pressure? A projectile nosebleed?

She willed herself to calm down, to breathe evenly. To think.

She closed her eyes, then opened them slowly again. It was as dark beyond her eyes as it had been behind the closed lids. Oh, not because she was blind. Star’s blindness was not total. When her drugged mother had pulled out in front of that truck eleven years ago when Star was seven, Star lost images but not light. She could see blobs, shapes, bright colors, and strangely enough, some cartoon figures, probably because they were drawn so simply. Her blind world was not a world without light, just a blurred world without distinguishable images. But it was black now.

The black orb she had seen had been blacker still. A black blotch on the sky. It had come from nowhere. It was simply there. Not there, then there.

Star watched it move slowly across the sky above her, blotting out everything, its gigantic shadow covering the earth. The whole earth! It went on and on, gobbled up the sky. Star could not imagine that anything could be that big, to cover up the whole sky. But it did.

And because it did, it left no place to run. So Star hadn’t tried to run. She had sat down and wrapped her arms around her legs with her forehead resting on her knees and tried to unhook from the gigantic mind that had placed that image in her head. No, not placed it there — that wasn’t accurate, but the image had come from that mind, the collective mind, the hive mind, up in the motherships.

She had put a toe into that gigantic mind seven years ago when she and Noah and Paco had been abducted, taken by a shuttle into the belly of a mothership. Once there, they could read each other’s thoughts. And they felt around them, well, she did anyway, the swirl of hundreds of billions of thoughts, a giant vortex of thoughts spinning around and around like water rushing toward the drain. It was the Astral hive mind and there was nothing else like it in the universe.

Star had tried once, only that one time, to tap into that hive mind with her own, to find individual thoughts. It was after she and Noah and Paco had been taken to the haunted house that wasn’t real, the one with the holographic horrors. They’d grabbed hands in fear and felt the snap! of connectivity, the three of them a mini-hive mind of their own. Noah had been describing Zion Academy to Paco, talking about the monastery with brown-robed monks who tended the huge farm. She had been listening, but then became aware of the background hum of the hive mind. The hum was always there — maybe it was a real sound or maybe just a psychic one, but from the moment Star set foot off the sand of the Taking Place and into the white “plastic” room in the mothership, there was never a moment when the hum was silent. It was as constant as her own heartbeat in her ears.

So she’d … reached out with her own mind. She just wanted to take a little peek into the monstrous collection of Astral thoughts whirring around her. It had lasted only a few moments, but there was a space of time when she thought she had … opened a door into it, just a crack. That she had connected her mind to their hive. Then the force of the massive number of thoughts knocked her individual thoughts aside. There were too many of them, traveling too fast, a huge rush, an avalanche, like holding out a water glass to Niagara Falls and hoping to catch just a few drops.

She had instantly retreated, pulled her mind back away from the “peeking crack” and returned to Noah’s description of a round man in a brown robe tossing feed to chickens. And after that, she wouldn’t allow her mind to go feeling around near the hive.

But the thing was … she’d always had a niggling feeling that she’d … left the door open. That when she’d tried to peek into the monster mind through a crack, she’d been knocked back … and had never closed the opening she’d created.

In the seven years since she and Paco and Noah had been in the mothership, Star had never once felt the presence of the Astral hive mind. Perhaps if she and Noah hadn’t been out in the middle of nowhere, perhaps if they’d been in a city with a mothership hanging in the sky above it, maybe then. But out here in rural Kentucky, with no motherships anywhere near, the hive mind was silent to her.

Until today.

Today, the mind had not so much reached out to her as … the mind was so full, with such incredible power, that it had overflowed. Thoughts had … spilled out of the hive mind … and out through the tiny crack Star had opened all those years ago, and she had been near enough, at least in psychic terms if not distance, to hear them. She hadn’t intended to, certainly didn’t want to.

Thoughts had spilled out of the hive mind because the entire mind, all the millions of billions of thoughts in the hive mind, had been totally focused on one incredible image, one mighty thing. Star caught the thoughts that … splashed into her mind through the crack, saw the image all those other minds saw.

Sitting there in the dark, Star tried to sort it out, to figure out what the hive mind had seen that was so incredible she had been able to see it, too. But there was a blank space in there, an empty spot that made it hard to piece the sequence of events together. She had gone to the gymnasium — how long ago? An hour? Five minutes? She didn’t know. Holding onto Pumpkin’s halter, she had let herself in the side door, hadn’t bothered to reach for the light switches, of course. When you were blind, turning the lights on wasn’t the first thing you thought of like it was for a sighted person. She just walked into the gym and into darkness.

Along the far wall under the basketball goal lay long sheets of butcher paper and cans of paint. Noah and his cousins Dave and Sam had spent the early morning hours spelunking in Matheson Caverns. Zion Village — the outgrowth of Zion Academy and the huge Gethsemane Monastery — lay between Jessup and the caverns, and once Noah and his father moved there, Noah spent untold hours in the caverns exploring and mapping the tunnels. He had arranged for them to meet Star at nine o’clock to make the gigantic sign they planned to hang in the center of the gym. They already had wires coming down from the ceiling struts. When they were finished, the sign would proclaim Happy Birthday Eagle Feather. Tomorrow, Eagle Feather Yellowhorse would be seventy-eight years old.

Star knew her grandfather would have a conniption fit when he realized the community of Zion Village was planning a party in his honor. At least an Apache warrior’s version of a conniption fit … which was a stone face and a grunt. She hoped that secretly, he’d appreciate the gesture. If it hadn’t been for the hunting and tracking skills he had so meticulously taught younger men once they got to Kentucky, their tables would not have been graced with all manner of wild game all these years.

He’d been an anomaly in New Mexico before Astral Day, an old Indian who kept to the ancient ways while the world passed him by. Then the world had turned upside down and wrong side out and he was suddenly as valued as Dr. Mikhail Ziegelman Garczonski, PhD, — Garson — the astrophysics professor who’d been claiming for his entire career that aliens had visited Earth many times in the ancient past.

Value systems had shifted in a heartbeat.

Star had been helping in the kitchen to prepare for the party, had gotten finished half an hour early and came to the gym to wait for Noah, Dave and Sam. She’d sat down on the gym floor beside Pumpkin — and that’s where the blank space was. She remembered everything up to that, then nothing until she woke up a few minutes ago from some dream, or from unconsciousness. Or from a vision. She didn’t know which. She just knew she had been sitting with her arm around her dog in the middle of the gym and the next thing she knew she was crying out in terror at the black blob, the black hole in the sky she could see behind her eyelids.

She didn’t know how long she had been … what? … unconscious?

Surely, the others would be here soon and — she stopped, thought for a moment. Was it possible that the same thing had happened to Noah?

She could find out, of course, but that wasn’t the way they’d worked things out over the years. When you could read the thoughts of someone else and they could read yours, it was both the most comforting, the most intimate and the most disturbing and intrusive thing it was possible to experience. She and Noah fit together into each other’s minds like a hand in a glove. They found that out on the mothership.

And that was glorious. But they still had to get up in the morning and brush their teeth and eat breakfast and lead normal lives. And you couldn’t do that when you were constantly being interrupted by someone rumbling around in your head. So they worked it out, the two of them. Speaking to Noah in his mind was just like she would have a conversation with him if he were standing in front of her. She would “talk,” to him, an intentional act. She had trained her mind not to just wander in unannounced and he had done the same. Now that reticence was second nature to them. They could, of course. But they respected each other’s space and didn’t.

Of course, when she did speak to him, he would see far more than what she actually said so even a casual conversation between them was still very deep and personal.

She felt an overpowering urge to call out to him now in his mind. To tell him to hurry to the gym. To tell him she was scared of the horrible black thing she had seen. She needed his comfort, his support, and the warmth of his presence inside her mind.

But she didn’t. She just got slowly to her knees, and then to her feet, and stood there in the darkness with …

What was the sticky stuff all over her hands? She lifted her hands to her face and she could smell it.

Paint!

Her hands were slathered with paint! How had she gotten paint on her hands when it was sitting in unopened cans on the other side of the room? She started to wipe it off on the front of her pants, but then didn’t. There was so much of it! It was like she’d stuck her hands down into the buckets … why?

She didn’t know. And the not-knowing was becoming as frightening as what she did know — that she had seen some horrible black thing in the Astrals’ hive mind.

So she stood, her fingers so sticky she couldn’t pet Pumpkin or scratch behind his ears. What was keeping them so long?

As if in answer to her question, she heard a sound in the back of the room, and then heard the whomp, whomp, whomp sound of the big banks of lights in the ceiling of the gymnasium being switched on, one after the other.

“Noah!” Star called out to him in his mind. “Something awful just …?”

It wasn’t Noah. It was his father. And almost as if she were touching him, she could feel emotions pulsing off him, like when she used to read fortunes when she was a little girl all those years ago in Roswell. What she felt pulsing off Sawyer Matheson was a sudden swirling of confusion and uncertainty, surprise morphing into stunned shock. What had he seen in that gymnasium in the light that she couldn’t see in the dark?