There was no fight left in Dan. Freya suggested they drive all the way to Marrion for dinner, and he nodded his acquiescence and threw the Toyota in gear. It felt like he would have responded the same way if Freya asked him to drive into the ocean. The heater was cranked as high as it could go, but the air only dried them out, their insides raw and frozen.

They drove for almost an hour in silence. Freya gave directions once they arrived at Marrion, hating the sound of her own voice. It was Friday night, but the town was dead. Without snow, there was no reason for anyone to be here.

Dan must have wondered why Freya had taken them so far to arrive at this sad little strip mall. Everything else was closed. The restaurant was sandwiched between a consignment shop and a barber. The plate glass window was so fogged up they couldn’t see anything inside, just lights glowing faintly through the condensation.

“Just wait,” Freya said when Dan raised his eyebrows at her. Maybe her thoughts were tawdry, and she didn’t deserve Unity, but Freya still knew how to pick out a restaurant.

Hoan Kiem was the only real Vietnamese restaurant for a hundred miles in any direction, but they didn’t rest on the monopoly. If anything, the food and décor were slightly too ambitious for the locals. Out-of-towners visiting ski resorts kept them afloat.

It was a Randall place. The owners were Mike and Steve Nguyen, two brothers from New Orleans. Randall used to take their money playing cutthroat, and then lose it right back to them playing Tien Len.

The brothers were an odd couple. Mike was stern with a strong accent, and Steve was fully Americanized and always teasing his older brother. Randall had never told Freya why the pair had left the south, but he’d implied it wasn’t by choice. She could almost taste their homesickness. On Saturdays, they had crawfish, and there was a waterfall pond at the front of the restaurant teeming with turtles destined for the pot.

Freya and Dan arrived in the lull after a large party had left. A waitress cleaned up three tables that had been pushed together. No one else was there.

“Kinda fancy,” Dan said, and Freya wished she would have thought about how underdressed they were. The walls were a spotless white, the tables and chairs made of heavy slabs of black oak. The waitress sat them next to the turtle pond, and they peered at the scrambling reptiles. There was a vent directly over the pond blowing warm air for the turtles, and Freya was glad to benefit.

“I think we’ll be okay. Don’t ask for spicy unless you really like spicy, though. They’re serious about it. Even medium spicy here is respectable.”

Dan nodded at her warning and peered at the menu, looking uncertain. “What should I get? I’ve never had Vietnamese food before.”

“I always get the beef pho. It’s amazing here.”

“Don’t they have lungs in that?” Dan asked.

“Just a little. Ask for no tripe if you don’t want it. Do you want to get coffee? It’s fancy here.”

Dan nodded eagerly.

“Coffee would be amazing.”

For the first time since the track, Dan smiled, and Freya smiled back. She was excited to share this with him. Dan’s eyes dropped back to the menu, and he shifted in his seat.

Freya gave him a questioning look, and he leaned in close, speaking in a dire whisper, “Freya, this is nineteen dollars.”

Freya felt relieved. It was the first problem today she could fix.

“I’ll get it, don’t worry. You drove us all the way out here.”

“I can’t let you pay for me,” he protested.

“Dan, an hour ago, I was you,” Freya said, and something about the way she said it stung them both. He shrugged in unhappy acceptance. They had bigger things to worry about. The waitress finished clearing the tables and splitting them apart into a neat row. Her voice was friendly but forced, obviously tired. Freya could relate. She told herself she would tip a little better than normal.

Turning over the menu, Freya toyed with the idea of trying something new, but she knew she would order the same Spicy Beef Pho as always. It was just too good to deviate. Dan took her suggestion and ordered the same, along with the Vietnamese coffee. They waited until the waitress was in the kitchen to start their conversation. They didn’t want to be overheard.

“Okay. What’s happening to us? Will it happen again?”

There was hunger in Dan’s voice. The desire to return to the feeling they’d shared on the track rose at the back of her thoughts, crowding out everything else.

“I hope so,” Freya said. “I’m afraid of wanting something so much. It feels like this could swallow us.”

Dan nodded. They couldn’t figure out what to say. Her thoughts kept sliding back to the park. They’d been so close. Now, it seemed hopeless to try and communicate with mere words.

The coffee arrived, served in glass mugs with just a layer of condensed milk at the bottom. The mugs were capped with individual coffee presses that looked like tiny chrome sombreros. Freya showed Dan the little latch to start the coffee drip.

“That’s so cool,” Dan said, lifting the cap on his press to see the apparatus underneath. “I’m glad we don’t have these at the diner! Imagine having to wash one for every cup of coffee.”

“It’s worth it,” Freya assured him. When the coffee brewed completely, she lifted off the filter and stirred gently with the little spoon until Jovian clouds of milk roiled through her glass. She took a sip. The coffee so sweet and strong. Dan watched her and did the same.

Hands clasped around the hot mug. With coffee warmth spreading through her chest, Freya felt like she was finally beginning to thaw. She reached her hand across the table to Dan and was relieved when he set his hand on hers. Their eyes met, and they didn’t need words. Freya wished she could just stare at him forever. She let the moment linger for as long as she could. In a few minutes, she was going to ruin everything again.

“Okay, are you ready?” Freya asked.

There was a long pause before he nodded. Freya slid her hand back across the table and into her pocket. She set the Starball on the table between them.

Dan recognized Freya’s lucky marble. He turned over his hand to stare at the spot on his palm where he’d been stuck. They both remembered the tiny drop of blood gleaming in the overhead light. There was a sudden clarity in Dan’s face. Freya knew exactly what he felt. He had convinced himself the jab in his palm was only a dream, but it was real.

Dan’s hands drifted to the sides of the heavy oak table. Freya was worried he was about to flip it over. There was a look in his eyes as if he’d just felt the first rumblings of an earthquake.

“Are you scared?” Freya asked.

“Yes,” Dan said simply. They were well past trying to act tough.

“Wait a few seconds, try not to think about anything, just pay attention to how you feel.”

Dan nodded with his mouth tight, his eyes locked on the orb.

“Do you feel something in you fighting against the fear? Like a cool feeling? Something not quite you?”

Dan shut his eyes as he searched himself.

“I feel it. I’ve felt that before, too. I didn’t know what it was.”

“The Starball, this orb, is doing that. If you touch it, you can feel it gets hot when it’s working.”

“Will it poke me again?” Dan asked, a tremble in his voice.

“I don’t think so. It only got me once,” Freya said.

“It stuck you, too?”

“Yes, on the night I found it. Until it got you, I had convinced myself I was just imagining it. I thought I was going crazy. You don’t have to touch it if you don’t want to.”

Dan hesitated, but then reached out and touched the orb with the tip of his index finger. He looked at the fingertip afterward. There was no blood.

“Okay. I feel it. It’s definitely heating up. What’s inside of it?”

“I don’t know. There has to be some kind of battery or power source. It gets hot whenever it’s working to make the connection between us or trying to keep us from freaking out.”

“I felt it getting hot in your pocket. When we were uh…” Dan struggled for words, “together,” he concluded. His eyes shot from the Starball to Freya. He was anxious.

“Freya, what is this thing?”

“I really don’t know what it is. Initially I thought it was a meteorite. I found it encased in a shell of nickel about the size of a baseball. It crashed into the Sillas River during the Taurids.”

“What are Taurids?”

Did people really not know that? Freya wondered. She reminded herself not everyone had grown up with an astronomy buff as a father.

“It’s a yearly meteor shower caused by one of the Apollo Group asteroids that might have broken off the Encke Comet. I don’t think this is a Taurid meteorite by the way. Meteorites are usually less than ten percent nickel. They tend to be more iron and rock. The Starball was perfectly nested at its center, like it was made for it.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“You call it a Starball?”

“Yeah, not very creative, I guess. It’s very dense and heavy for its size. Did you notice?”

“Can I?” Dan asked, and she nodded. He picked up the Starball and hefted it in one hand, then in the other, and then he nodded. “Is it lead at the center or something?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s too heavy to be lead. I’ve looked at the Starball under a microscope. That purple surface is actually a grid of triangles. It’s not natural, and I don’t think it was made by humans. I think this is either an alien probe, or it is itself an alien.”

Dan shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He struggled. Freya was silent, trying to let him absorb the idea. The waitress came to check on them, and as she approached, Freya instinctively hid the Starball beneath her palm, Dan’s hand reached over to cover hers.

When the waitress left them, Dan stared at his hand, as if unsure why he’d done that. He flexed his fingers and wrung his wrist.

“It made me do that,” he said, his face growing pale. “It’s in my head. Freya, did you know this was an alien when you handed it to me?”

Oh, no.

Freya’s stomach sank. This was what she’d been afraid of.

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t know it would jab you. I just wasn’t thinking. I’m only guessing about all this. I just don’t know.”

“What if we’re infected with it? What if it’s controlling us? What if this Starball made you hand it to me because it wanted me to catch this, too?”

Freya didn’t have an answer.

“It’s trying to get me to stop freaking out right now. I can feel it,” Dan said. There was a wild look in his eyes, like he might be about run screaming out of the restaurant and drive away.

“Please…” Freya trailed. She was afraid she might start crying.

“How do you know? How do you know it isn’t making us do whatever it wants?” Dan’s voice was raised, and there was an almost manic quality to it.

The waitress emerged from the kitchen to see what the commotion was, and Dan lowered his head and gave an apologetic wave. The Starball was hot against Freya’s palm.

“I hate people who fight in restaurants,” Dan said with a strangely absent look. Freya wondered if the Starball was influencing him.

“It’s totally a fair question. Maybe it is controlling me,” Freya said. “But it hasn’t done anything bad. It’s the opposite.”

Freya paused to look at Dan, she hated to see him struggling like this. She slipped the Starball into her pocket and slid her hand across the table to him, afraid he wouldn’t take it. But he did. He stared at her intently, desperate for answers.

“Dan,” she began, and then stopped until she was sure she could say it. She was just a breath or two ahead of bursting into tears.

“When I found it, I was at the river to drown myself,” she admitted at last.

The words resonated in the air, and a long silence followed them. Freya became aware the waitress had turned up the background music to mask their argument. The sound of the waterfall drowned out all but the highest notes.

“How close did you come?” Dan asked. His interest was almost clinical. It reminded Freya of Dr. Garbuglio.

“I went into the river. I barely made it out,” Freya said. “All this terrible shit keeps happening to me. I keep being almost ready to jump, but the Starball saves me every time. It’s the only reason I’m still here.”

Her words hurt Dan. His expression twisted with pain, and she felt just awful. Why was she putting this on him?

“Have you told Dr. Garbuglio?”

“I haven’t told him anything. No one can know about the Starball. He caught me with my hand in my pocket, but I told him it was just a marble. He didn’t touch it.”

“Does he know you went in?” Dan said, and she noticed the strange tendency to euphemism again. Went in.

She shook her head. “If I had told him, he would have had me sent to Northern Light hospital. I’d probably still be locked up there.”

Dan’s mouth was tight, his bottom lip trembling slightly. He didn’t argue with her or tell her what she should have done. She was grateful for that. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. He gave her hand a squeeze of reassurance.

“I don’t think the Starball is trying to make me do anything I don’t want to. It just doesn’t want me to hurt myself, and it doesn’t want me to show it to other people. It seems benign.” The word came out funny, like she described a tumor.

“Does it ever talk?”

“No. I’ve tried all kinds of stuff, tapping on it, seeing if it can broadcast to computers, measuring its temperature for pulses, nothing. It’s silent.”

Dan had that pained look again. “What’s wrong?” Freya asked.

“Did you like me before you found it?”

Freya paused. In all her fretting over this, she hadn’t anticipated that question. It seemed so natural to like Dan. He was handsome, he was fit, he was thoughtful. Why shouldn’t she like him? But once the idea was posed, she found she couldn’t answer it. Was this really her idea?

Immediately, she thought she should lie and pretend there was nothing ambiguous about her feelings for Dan. But she was certain if they made the connection again, the lie would immediately unravel. She couldn’t conceal anything. He stared at her, waiting for an answer as her mind fell into a jumble of gross and embarrassing things she never wanted anyone to know.

Hadn’t she felt the same feeling coming from him? There on the edge of the bed, there’d been something big he wanted to hide, bigger than the overdose. The hope in his eyes was faltering with every second she delayed.

“I didn’t really know you before Renanin,” Freya said. “That was after the river.” She tried to be kind, but he saw right through the evasion. Who did she think she was fooling?

An hour ago, I was you.

“So, all of this, that weird connection and the dream, it could all just be this alien trying to push us together,” Dan said, and his eyes had become narrow, his expression hard. “Shipping us.”

“It’s not that.” Freya caught herself trying to spare him again and forced herself to stop and think about how she felt. “I feel like the way I feel about you is coming from me not it. But I can’t know. Did you like me before it stuck you?”

“Yes. Definitely,” Dan said. The immediate way he said it and the earnest look on his face made her feel terrible. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

“I didn’t think you would be interested in me. The way you see me is so different from the way I see myself.”

“Of course, I’m interested. I never met anyone like you,” Dan said. “I want to be the person you see, the person I am when we’re together. I want to be worthy of that feeling,” he said. It had the almost-rehearsed feeling of something he had turned over and over in his mind, trying to find the right way to say it. Freya wasn’t the only one who’d spent all day agonizing over this meeting.

“You are,” she said, but she saw he couldn’t believe her any more than she could believe him.

“This is so hard. I’m sorry for dragging you into this. Please, believe me, I didn’t know this would happen. You really are amazing, Dan. You deserve way better.”

“No, I don’t. I really like you. I mean, you know. You felt me thinking it.”

Somehow, even though she knew it, even though she’d felt it, hearing Dan say the words made her pulse with joy.

“I feel the same way about you,” Freya said. She danced along the edge of all the things she wanted to confess but was afraid to. They were caught in each other’s eyes, each wishing the other had the courage they lacked. She took the cowardly route and changed the topic.

“So, I’m like, really afraid I’m going to gross you out if we connect like that again. There are a lot of things I don’t want other people to know. I have all these stray, unworthy thoughts. And, like, there’s just some stuff involved with being female I’m not sure you’re ready for.”

It took Dan a second to recognize what she was getting at.

“Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “I think I’ll be okay. I’m way more worried about how you’ll feel. Freya, I’m just disgusting, you have no idea. I’m legitimately terrified. There’s—” he began to say something, but he couldn’t complete it. His face was scrunched with tension, but he just couldn’t get the words out.

“It’s okay,” she said. She paused, inviting him to continue. Dan shook his head. He wasn’t ready, and it was his turn to chicken out and change the subject. He rubbed the back of his head.

“What do we do? Aren’t we supposed to tell someone about this? It seems like an insanely huge thing for the two of us to deal with alone.”

“I don’t think we should,” Freya said. She fumbled to justify herself.

“I think they would probably lock us up and study us. They’d the Starball away. I don’t want to be separated from it. I don’t want to be separated from you. The thing that’s happening to us, I don’t want to stop. I want to get to that place and never leave.”

He shut his eyes and nodded. It seemed like he wanted it very much.

“Freya, what if this is an alien invasion? What if it was sent here to pacify us so they can take over?”

“Take over what?”

“I don’t know, the world? What if they want to enslave us, or wipe us out?”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“I don’t know, just, that’s what they do in movies.”

“In movies written by humans, Dan. Aliens in those are just a stand-in for tribal xenophobia. I have no idea what the motives of the Starball are. I can’t even tell if it’s a living thing or just a machine.”

“Maybe it’s a scout for their invasion force.”

“It’s not a problem,” Freya said, glad to find something she felt certain about.

“Huh?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Let’s say the Starball came from the absolute closest star system, Alpha Centauri. That’s 4.3 light years away. Let’s say it’s flying as fast as the fastest object we’ve ever observed in space, though I know it wasn’t even close to that fast because it would have burned up in the atmosphere. At that speed, it would have taken twenty thousand years to get here. Even if they’re preparing an invasion force right now, and it leaves tomorrow, we’ll be long gone before they arrive.”

“What do you mean long gone?”

“I mean people won’t be here when they arrive. Our civilization isn’t sustainable, Dan. There are too many of us, we use too many resources, and we’re headed for a big crash. When that happens, it just takes one nuke to start the party.”

Dan’s face grew ashen. He hadn’t been prepared to hear that. Not everyone had grown up with Randall.

“The truth is way scarier than aliens,” Freya said, her voice bitter. “We should honestly be praying this is aliens planning to take over. We aren’t going to make it on our own.”

“Did you think that before you found the Starball?” Dan asked, staring at her closely.

“Yeah. Randall and I used to talk about it a lot. Do you know what the Fermi paradox is?”

Dan shook his head.

“It’s the idea that there are so many stars out there intelligent life should have already tried to contact us. There are a lot of attempted explanations for it, one of them is called The Great Filter. It’s the idea that civilizations capable of interstellar communication tend to extinguish themselves within a hundred years or so of developing the capability. That’s definitely us.”

Dan took a deep sip of his coffee as he tried to wrap his mind around it. Freya glanced towards the kitchen, wondering where their soup was. It shouldn’t take this long to make pho. She was hungry, and the coffee was putting her on edge.

“I just…” Dan began, and then he closed his mouth, swallowing whatever he meant to say. He took a few moments to compose himself before he tried again. “Freya, this is dangerous. We don’t know what the Starball is, or what it’s doing. I think we should try to get some help.”

He’d sat up straight as he said it, looking determined. This was the Dan she really wanted. He was so much sharper with her than he seemed around everyone else, where he was always joking around and playing dumb. With a pang of sorrow, she knew she might be about to lose him, but it was hopeless to try and conceal how she felt.

Alea iacta est.

“I already chose,” she said. “I was already gone when I found the Starball. I want to see where it takes me. I’m not going to tell anybody else but you about it. Come with me, Dan.”

“I can’t just surrender myself like that,” Dan protested.

“I did,” Freya said.

“You don’t have to. We can talk to Dr. Garbuglio together, try and figure this out. We can be strong on our own,” Dan said.

“Dan,” Freya said his name softly, and stared into his eyes. She didn’t want to hurt him. She knew she was going to anyway.

“You’re just pretending.”

Her words burned in. They lowered their heads, their eyes welling with tears, and there were no more words. They both knew it was true.

The waitress waited until they were both done crying to bring them their soup.