Chapter 0 - Dust
Our ancestors never mourned the loss of the ancient apes.
Kyla had learned the new quiet.
It wasn’t silence. There was always something. Wind worrying at loose sheet metal. A dog barking once and stopping, as if it remembered the rules. The distant, patient clank of someone making do with old tools because new ones were rare and precious and kept behind locks.
The town sat low in a bowl of prairie, a grid of streets that still pretended to be orderly. A water tower leaned like it was tired. The mill on the river had taken a direct hit during the war, half its roof missing, its smokestack snapped and lying in the mud like a felled tree. But the brick walls were stubborn, and so was the river, and so were the people who’d decided bricks and water were enough to start again.
Kyla knelt in the dirt beside a vehicle that used to be a helicopter.
It still had the body for it: belly like a rounded metal fish, side doors scarred, cockpit glass crazed in spiderweb lines that never seemed to spread. It even had the stub where the mast would’ve risen, though the rotor assembly was long gone. Sold, scavenged, repurposed into a hundred things that were never meant to fly again.
What made it lift now was bolted beneath the frame on a cradle of welded steel: a black, smooth module the size of a cooler if it had been flattened, its surface so clean it looked wrong among everything else. From it, wires ran to other similar looking pieces of smooth, black material as well as a number of pieces that looked like they were scavenged from a junk yard. Kyla had wrapped the larger piece in old tire rubber and leather straps to keep the dust out and the vibration down. No one knew if dust mattered to it. No one knew what mattered to it. But everyone knew you didn’t treat the alien parts like regular parts… not if you wanted them to keep working.
Kyla wiped her hands on her pants and leaned in close to the open side panel. The human guts were messy. Wires spliced to wires, patchwork harnesses, a battery bank built from salvaged cells, a switch Kyla had labeled with paint: UP. That switch was a joke until you saw what it did.
It was one of kind. Not in the proud way one would describe something ugly they built with blood and sweat. It was literally the only ship in her town or the surrounding areas that could fly like that. Hybrid alien-human tech.
The radio on the workbench crackled.
“Kyla,” a voice said. Static chewed at the edges. “You still at the shop?”
Kyla reached over and thumbed the transmit. “Yeah.”
“You done fiddling?”
Kyla glanced at the module. The module gave nothing back. “Two minutes.”
A beat. “You said that ten minutes ago.”
Kyla smiled without meaning to. “I was wrong.”
Outside the open bay of the barn, morning moved slowly. A pair of kids hauled a handcart past a crater that had become a pond. Someone’s chickens pecked at the edge of it. A man in a patched coat stood in the road taking a break from carrying some crates and stared at the sky like he expected it to do something.
Kyla slid a side panel closed and tapped it with her knuckles as if giving herself reassurance that she actually knew what she was doing. The sound was solid enough to trust. She walked around to the cockpit and climbed in.
The seat had been replaced with a bench from a school bus. The harness was braided rope with a quick-release from something military. Kyla hooked it with a habit that didn’t feel like superstition and lifted the rifle from where it lay on the floor.
It wasn’t for aliens. A human weapon was a joke against alien technology.
But other humans could still be dangerous these days… and a rifle was still a rifle to a human. A safety blanket with weight. Kyla set it where she could reach it without thinking.
Not because today was supposed to be dangerous.
Because the world still could be.
She toggled the power.
The human systems woke in a familiar way: a whine, a click, a set of lights that flickered because the wiring was shoddy at best and loose connections were something you lived with. The alien module did not wake. It was already awake or it was never asleep or it didn’t have a concept for either.
Kyla put a hand on the switch labeled UP and hesitated, not out of fear but out of respect for the unknown.
Then Kyla flipped it.
The craft didn’t shudder like a machine straining. It simply unweighted.
The pressure in Kyla’s bones eased. Dust stirred beneath the skid rails and drifted outward in a slow halo. The world didn’t fall away so much as admit it could.
Kyla touched the stick—another salvage, another retrofit—and the craft leaned like a horse understanding rein pressure. No rotor wash. No chop-chop-thump. Just the faint, steady hum that you felt more than heard, like standing near a power line.
She lifted over the shop roof, over the leaning water tower, over the grid of streets pretending to be the skeleton of a town. She banked south.
From above, the war showed its handwriting.
A line of black earth cut across the fields where something had burned so hot it fused the soil. Nothing grew there. Scars ran through woods in straight, impossible strokes. Here and there, a piece of wreckage lay half-buried like a bone. Curved metal too smooth, angles that didn’t belong to anything made on Earth. What people hadn’t scavenged, they built fences around. Either staking a claim or scared about what may be beyond.
Kyla kept low, following the river. The river was safer. The river meant people. People meant help if the module decided to have an opinion. Alien tech could have a mind of its own from time to time.
A perimeter appeared in the distance outside of town made of old chain-link and rundown barricades. It was built by humans after the facility arrived but was now abandoned and in disrepair. For a short time after the war, guards were placed at the perimeter because the town didn’t know what else to do. They weren’t there to stop the aliens from leaving or invading further. Humans were ineffective against alien weapons. Its only real purpose was a deterrent for the curious, the uninvited.
Beyond the perimeter, the landscape changed again.
The alien facility loomed on the outskirts of the main town, a shape that refused to look like anything. It wasn’t a tower or a dome or a ship. It was a cluster of structures that seemed to lean into each other, all smooth surfaces and hard shadows. It sat where a whole neighborhood used to be, one that had been destroyed in the war. Kyla had been young when the neighborhood still existed, a new development with a name like Forest Ridge that promised something more than plywood and plastic siding.
Now there was only the facility and the ground it claimed.
Just the certainty of it, like a mountain you hadn’t noticed until you were standing under it.
Kyla didn’t fly toward the facility. Not right now. She turned east, toward the old machine plant that had been converted into a market.
The plant’s outer wall was tagged with paint in a dozen different hands. Some of it was names. Some of it was curses. Some of it was prayers that had learned to be blunt.
A lot of what remained referenced an artifact people said had survived from before the war. A rock with a carving in it. Five stick figures, clearly human, each one slightly larger than the last.
Some thought it showed humanity falling backward into simpler lives. Others insisted it was nothing more than a child’s depiction of people growing older. Kyla had always felt that if you looked at it just right, it was someone being pulled into something bigger.
Whatever it meant, people treated it like it mattered.
Inside the market, the air carried oil, smoke, boiled grain, and something sweet trying to mask all three. Stalls had been wedged between old assembly lines, the skeletal arms of the machinery frozen mid-task above tables covered in salvaged tarp and sheet metal. Extension cords snaked across the concrete floor like exposed veins.
People moved with tired purpose. Not hurried, not relaxed. Trading jars of preserved vegetables for batteries. Strips of cured meat for antibiotics. A hand-painted sign offered “repaired circuit boards - mostly stable.” It felt less like a market and more like a demonstration of one. A diorama of human commerce assembled from memory.
Livestock threaded through the aisles. Goats tied to tool racks. Chickens nesting in milk crates. A mule stood patiently beside a cart welded from shopping trolleys and bicycle parts. Some animals were for sale. Others were simply working.
A few internal combustion engines coughed and rattled at the edges of the space — one powering a grinder, another hooked into a generator that hummed unevenly. An old pickup truck idled near the back, cables running from its battery into a web of lights strung overhead. It was easier to leave it running than trust it would start again.
At the far wall, an LED board scavenged from a concession stand at a ballpark or some event center flickered important messages: trade ratios, fuel allotments, conflict mediation hours. The pixelated text buzzed faintly, as if irritated at being repurposed.
And beyond it all, in a section cleared of debris and outlined in fresh white paint, the aliens, or whatever passed for them, stood.
Their ship loomed behind them. Not large. Just wrong. It didn’t dominate the space so much as interrupt it.
The market bent around that interruption.
Three shapes today. Sometimes more. Sometimes fewer. Tall, layered forms that caught the light wrong. No clear faces. No eyes to meet. Their presence cooled the air without changing the temperature.
No one was certain if these were the aliens themselves or tools they used, machines grown to interface with humans, biological or mechanical or both. No alien body had ever been recovered. Rumors existed. Stories circulated. Proof did not.
The space around them felt colder. Not physically. Socially.
Transactions happened anyway.
A woman waved to Kyla from a stall made of cobbled shelving.
Mara. Same age range as Kyla, same hard-work build, hair braided tight because loose hair got caught in gears and wind and trouble. Mara’s grin could disarm the aliens if she really tried.
“You look like hell,” Mara yelled.
Kyla set the craft down in the designated landing patch. Dust rose and settled as if the building sighed. “If you had my morning, you’d look worse.”
“We can argue about mornings later.” Mara tossed Kyla a water bottle. “You’re late.”
Kyla caught it one-handed, took a mouthful, and swallowed. “Everything decided to have an attitude this morning.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to the underside of the craft. The smooth black module sat there like a thought you couldn’t shake. “What’d you have to do? What did it do?”
“It did what it always does.” Kyla twisted the cap back on. “Had an attitude and then decided to go to work.”
That was the closest anyone came to gratitude toward alien technology. You didn’t thank it. You didn’t praise it. You used it and hoped it kept allowing itself to be used.
Mara jerked her chin toward the far end. “They’re in a mood.”
Kyla followed her gaze. One of the aliens had turned if “turned” meant rotating a fraction and shifting its weight in a way that made nearby humans step back without realizing. A trade had gone wrong, or gone slow, or gone like any trade between species who couldn’t speak and didn’t share assumptions.
Kyla walked with Mara toward their stall. The stall held crates: dried grain, sealed jars, coiled wire, a sack of copper scrap. Beside it, a pile of things that looked like junk and felt like currency: old circuit boards, heat-resistant composite plates, a strip of translucent material that Mara swore came from “one of the bad guys’ ships.”
“Where’d you get this?” Kyla asked, touching the translucent strip. It was light, warm to the finger even in the cool air.
Mara shrugged. “Found it where we’re not supposed to go.”
Kyla gave a quiet laugh that was half warning. “You keep doing that and you’re gonna end up not returning.”
Mara’s grin faltered. “Don’t say that.”
Kyla didn’t mean it as a threat. Kyla meant it as reality.
People went. People volunteered. People got recruited, depending on who you asked. People just left town without word and never returned. They went toward the facility in caravans, or got transported, drawn by promises that were never spoken out loud but lived in the air: better food, better shelter, better medicine, a better position in whatever world was coming next.
Some came back quiet, with eyes that didn’t settle right.
Some didn’t come back at all.
No bodies. No funerals. Just absence.
Mara leaned closer. “My uncle says they’re building ships.”
Kyla looked toward the aliens. “Everyone says something.”
“My uncle worked here in this plant before it turned into this flea market.” Mara’s voice dropped. “He knows what an assembly line looks like. He says the way their stuff moves… it’s like they’re putting something together.”
Kyla stared past the market, past the plant’s open bay doors, to the distant facility that sat like a fact. “Could be anything.”
Mara picked up a small package wrapped in cloth. “We have a trade. Same as always. They want this.”
Kyla unfolded the cloth. Inside lay a block of dull, gray metal with a symbol etched into it—human hands had made the block, but the symbol was alien, carved in careful lines. Kyla had seen that symbol in the ruins, too, stamped into fragments like branding.
“What is it?” Kyla asked, even though she knew what Mara would say.
Mara shrugged again, but this time it carried less humor. “What we give them. They give us…” She gestured toward a shelf behind her, where a small device sat that looked like a lantern but never needed fuel, never got hot, and ran for months. “…stuff.”
Kyla wrapped the block back up. “Payment’s fair?”
“Fair’s not the word.” Mara’s smile returned, smaller. “But it’s what we’ve got. I still see people trying to haggle. I suppose they’re hoping that one day they may get through to them?”
They stepped into the painted-line space. The aliens stood still. Kyla approached slowly and set the package on a metal table.
The alien closest to Kyla shifted. Something, a limb, unfolded in a way that made Kyla’s shoulder blades tighten. It reached carefully, without aggression, and touched the cloth-wrapped block. It paused. Then it made a sound.
Not speech. Not even language. A series of tones that made the air feel like it was being measured.
Kyla answered the only way she could.
“Yeah,” Kyla said. “That’s it. That’s what you asked for.”
The alien made another series of tones. It gestured toward a crate at its feet. Kyla couldn’t tell if the gesture meant “take,” “wait,” or “go away.”
Kyla reached anyway.
The crate’s lid lifted with a hiss. Inside lay a set of sealed canisters, each labeled in human writing and alien marks. They were small enough to carry. Too neat. Too clean.
“Today we’ve got,” Mara inspected, “Medicine.”
Kyla picked up the canisters and stuffed them in her crate.
Mara backed away first, eyes wide, then mimicked a curtsy. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Kyla shoved the crate into Mara’s arms. “C’mon, I have things to do.”
As they worked, other humans approached the alien space: a man with a cart of metal scrap, a woman with two teenagers behind her who moved like they’d been rehearsed, a cluster of workers with packs and hard faces, the kind of faces people wore when they’d decided fear was a waste of time.
Kyla watched the teenagers. One of them looked at Kyla like Kyla had answers.
Kyla looked away.
Mara leaned on the stall’s edge. “You coming tonight?”
“To what?”
“The bonfire.” Mara tilted her head. “We found some old music. Real music. Not just somebody hitting a can and calling it rhythm while they screamed at the sky.”
Kyla almost smiled. “Where’d you find it?”
Mara’s eyes went bright again. “Same place I found that other thing.”
Kyla shook her head, but it was fond. “If you somehow get me killed, I’m haunting you.”
Mara laughed. “You’ll be too busy working on engines in the afterlife to haunt anyone.”
Kyla loaded the crate of canisters into the craft. Then she loaded people.
Volunteers, if you believed the word still meant what it used to. They climbed into the back. Four today, all adults, all carrying small packs. One of them wore a necklace with a symbol Kyla didn’t recognize, something new made from old desperation. Another had her hair shaved on one side and a look in her eyes that was almost hungry.
Kyla didn’t ask questions. You couldn’t trust most answers these days.
Mara climbed into the passenger seat and buckled in. “I’m coming,” she announced.
Kyla glanced at her. “No.”
Mara’s grin was gone now. “Ky…”
Kyla’s hands tightened on the stick. “You’re not.”
Mara stared. “You don’t get to decide.”
Kyla looked past her, to the volunteers in the back. “I don’t decide anything,” Kyla said quietly. “But I’m not flying you there.”
Mara’s jaw flexed. “Why?”
Kyla wanted to say: Because you’re my friend and I never know if I’m coming back.
Kyla said instead: “Because I need you here.”
Mara’s eyes softened for half a second. Then her defenses came back up. “You need me to be your mechanic,” she said with humor.
Kyla snorted. “You’re barely a mechanic.”
Mara smiled despite herself. “At least I look good while I’m doing it.”
“Fine.”
Kyla started the systems. The craft lifted. The volunteers braced as the ground admitted it could let go.
Kyla flew the familiar route toward the facility but did not approach the facility. Not directly. There was a designated drop point: a patch of cleared earth about a hundred yards out, marked by poles that nobody had placed there and nobody dared remove.
Kyla set the craft down.
The volunteers climbed out in silence. One of them—a woman with hands scarred from years of manual work—paused at the door and looked back.
“Do they…” she began.
Kyla didn’t answer because Kyla didn’t know which question she meant.
Do they hurt you? Do they pay you? Do they change you? Do they bring you back?
The woman swallowed the question and climbed down. The group walked toward the facility as if walking toward a storm you couldn’t avoid by running.
Kyla waited until they were just figures against that impossible architecture.
Then Kyla turned away.
On the flight back, Mara didn’t speak. Kyla didn’t push. The landscape rolled beneath them. Fields reclaimed by weeds, roads with long cracks, the ribs of old cars rusting in ditches like fossils. Humans were rebuilding, but the rebuild looked different than it used to. More gardens. More hand labor. Small engines patched into life. Human technology intertwined with alien, not as a ladder upward, but as a crutch to keep from falling.
The craft settled back near the shop. Kyla guided it into the bay and cut power. The hum faded. The weight returned to bones.
Mara unbuckled and jumped down without looking at Kyla. “See you tonight…and do something with your hair before you leave the house.”
Kyla threw a balled up piece of paper at her and watched her go.
Then Kyla slung the rifle over her shoulder and started walking home.
The road cut through the center of town. People had gathered there, drawn by voices, drawn by friction. A makeshift platform had been built from scraps of materials no one had yet found a use for. Someone stood on it. Old Hal, who’d been old even before the war. He had the kind of charisma you got when you survived everything and decided survival proved you were right.
“—telling you,” Hal was saying, “they didn’t come here to save us. They came here because they needed us. They came here because we’re useful… and useful ain’t free.”
A murmur of agreement.
Another voice cut in from the crowd. “We’d be dead without them!”
“That’s the point,” Hal shot back. “They know it. They know we’ll take anything they give if it means we get to breathe tomorrow. They also know that we’ll try to take it from them if we had the ability to.”
Kyla slowed at the edge of the crowd. Heads turned. People recognized her. People always did. Kyla was their only pilot successfully using technology no one could understand.
“Ky!” someone called. “Tell them.”
Kyla stopped.
Hal pointed at Kyla like a weapon. “You’ve seen their trade and how they treat us. You go to their fortress all the time. You tell these fools what it is.”
Another man pushed forward, angry. “They give us medicine. They give us light. They give us…”
“They give you a leash,” Hal snapped.
Kyla felt the crowd’s attention tighten. A dozen different expectations pressed in. Be grateful. Be angry. Be brave. Be careful. Be a symbol.
Her throat went dry.
“I don’t know what it is,” Kyla said finally.
“You know enough,” Hal scoffed, then paused. “They work with you,” he added, with a hint of disgust.
Kyla looked at Hal. “I know they trust me for some reason… if that’s what you want to call it. They respond to me differently, and I don’t know why. But I only know the same things you all do. They can erase us if they want. I believe they won’t. I know people go to the facility and some don’t come back. I know we can’t go in uninvited. And they have these facilities all around that they built without asking for permission. They’re just here...”
No one said anything.
Kyla continued, voice steadier now that it had started. “I also know we’re alive. I know the bad ones would’ve killed everyone. I know we’re rebuilding. I know the trade keeps people fed, though I don’t know why they trade with us. Their tech that we can scavenge and keep makes life easier… and their medicine helps heal the sick and wounded.”
Hal leaned forward. “And that’s supposed to make it acceptable?”
Kyla opened her mouth.
A sound cut through the air—low, distant, and wrong.
Every head lifted.
It came from the horizon where the facility sat, but not from the facility itself. A secondary structure near it, a pad, maybe, or something that looked like a pad only if you squinted and applied human logic that glowed faintly in the daylight.
Then something rose.
Not like an aircraft fighting gravity. Not like a rocket on fire clawing upward toward the clouds. It lifted as if the planet had decided to let go. A long shape, dark against the sky, with edges that didn’t reflect light so much as refuse it.
It climbed slowly.
The crowd had gone silent. Even Hal didn’t speak.
Kyla watched the thing rise and felt a mix of awe and anger and the old war-sickness of realizing the world could change in a second and you might not get a vote.
The ship continued upward until it was just a point against the pale morning. It didn’t leave smoke. It didn’t roar. It simply departed.
Ships came and went from the alien facility, but they never left the planet. Once the aliens arrived, they stayed. This was new.
Someone in the crowd whispered, “What is it? Where’s it going?”
No one answered.
Kyla looked at the faces around her—hollow, hopeful, furious, numb—and realized that whatever argument they were having in the street didn’t matter as much as the fact that the ship existed at all.
They were all reminded again that there was a universe above them now. A real one. A populated one… one that might not care about them at all.
And something had just left Earth like it was nothing.
No one moved.
Then, from somewhere behind the crowd, a child began to cry. The sound thin and human and honest in a world that had learned to hide its fear.
Kyla turned toward home, the rifle heavy on her shoulder, the sky bigger than it used to be.