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Please see our important Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

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My dearest Evie—

I am so terribly sorry, my darling daughter, but by the time you read this letter, I will be gone. I wish I could have delayed my departure long enough to attend your high school graduation as I always promised I would, but the timing was outside of my control.

And so I’m taking a few of my final (for now) moments on Earth to put down on paper what I’ve already told you to your face. Or told you to your back anyway, when you had your arms crossed and shoulders hunched and I wasn’t sure whether you were even listening.

But please, my not-so-little girl, remember this—

When your name is called, and you take the stage to receive your diploma, I hope you’ll pause, I hope you’ll look up, I hope you’ll know in the moment that though I’ll be millions of miles away—millions of miles, can you believe it?—I’ll be with you still. Because I, also, keeping track of when that moment will occur, will be pausing, will be looking—looking back at the planet I left behind, a planet which at that moment might seem for me no more than a speck—and thinking of you.

But that’s only one of my hopes.

I hope, once you’re older, you’ll understand why this had to be.

I hope you’ll agree that what the alien Visitors offered—not just to me, not just to you, but to every living creature on Earth—is a greater gift than the time together the two of us lost.

I hope you’ll someday add your name to their registry as well, entering the lottery to the stars as I did, and are lucky enough to be selected, too, so you can also see what’s out there.

I hope you’ll be sure in your heart, as I am, that the wonders to come will outnumber the ones we will have left behind.

Those wonders are more than what they tell me I’ll experience personally out in the void, and what you’d experience if you were to follow. Because believe me, that alone would never have been enough to separate me from you. I’m not making this choice selfishly. But if our parting will make the world a better place for you? Build you a future I alone could never construct?

What loving parent wouldn’t make that sacrifice?

I can only imagine how the world—and how you—will change during my absence. Oh, the miracles they’ve promised to turn over to our planet if a handful of us would agree to travel the universe with them!

Pollution-free power.

The end of hunger.

The death of cancer.

And so much more.

For me to leave with the Visitors means you’ll get to live a life on Earth which never could have existed without them. How could I not do this?

I did this for you, Evie.

I did it for you.

Though I won’t be there, at least not physically, for the major milestones which you’ll surely achieve over the next few years—I have no idea how long this trip will take, since from what I’ve learned so far during my brief orientation, the aliens’ concept of time doesn’t seem to be the same as ours—a mother’s love will always be there. Which is why I wrote out and packed these letters in your favorite lunchbox before leaving—the one with the rainbow girls and their flying horses.

You have always been my rainbow girl. You know that, right?

I also know what you’re thinking. I can almost see the roll of your eyes, hear your voice as you say, “Letters? Really, Mom? Who puts their thoughts down on paper anymore? Couldn’t you just record some video the way a normal person would do?”

But you know me. I’m kind of old-fashioned that way. Even though I’ll be gone, I want you to be able to pretend I’m still there with you, continuing to leave notes each morning on the kitchen table the way I used to do . . . well, after I’d push away the insides of the microwave or whatever kitchen gadget you’d taken apart with promises to put it back again once your tinkering was done. (And you always did, you always did.) Which is why I’ve marked the flaps of these envelopes so you’ll know to open each one at the appropriate time as each milestone of your life comes to pass.

Be a good girl, Evie. And know that I love you.

Missing you so much right now it’s as if I’m already among the stars,

Mom

• • • •

When the aliens returned Jeri to the same spot from which she’d been taken—which, after all, is what she’d been promised, and since throughout their journey she’d never known them to lie, what she’d expected—she assumed after all those years the intake center would be surrounded by a circle of gleaming towers which would have been impossible before the visitation which changed the world. Earth, she knew, would surely have put to good use the knowledge gained by the sacrifice of her absence.

So she expected to step outside the transport pod in which she’d been cast to the surface and breathe cleaner air than she’d ever known.

She expected to see unimaginable miracles both on land and in the sky.

She expected to find the science and technology she’d witnessed during her travels present on the home planet she’d left behind, transforming it into something different. Something better.

But most of all, she expected to see Evangeline again, welcoming her back to Earth. Perhaps even bringing along Jeri’s granddaughter (not yet even on the horizon when she’d left, but still, hoped for). The thought of seeing them both was what had kept her going during her darker days in deep space.

Not that there were many such days. She’d been treated well, even as she knew her every word, every action, was being weighed to determine whether what Earth had been given Earth would be allowed to keep. But years away were years away, even when surrounded and distracted by unearthly marvels.

That eventual reunion, and the loneliness she knew her daughter would feel until it could take place, was the reason she’d left all those letters behind. She’d hoped they would help Evie forgive, allow her to set aside her own flavor of pain, which she’d surely tasted during their separation.

But instead, once the door of her globe split open, Jeri stepped from the small vehicle to find the air around her so foul she instantly began to cough, and find the alien intake center which surrounded her in ruins, not one soul there to greet her. Gasping, she pulled her shirt collar over her nose, and stared about in shock. There were no family members, none of the support personnel who’d prepped her, no one to explain how the world she’d left behind had become the shattered world she’d found, rather than the world her sacrifice had been meant to produce.

She no longer even needed to step through a door to get back to that world. Instead, a blasted circle pierced what remained of a wall. Most of the roof was gone as well. No stars were visible in the daytime sky, but still, she looked up, as if tilting her head back was alone enough to let her see where she’d spent the past decade. She wondered what went wrong.

She thought of her daughter, and the letters she’d left behind which had been filled with the faith of better times to come, but which the world she saw around her had made into lies.

Anger shook her from her shock, and she remembered what she’d been instructed to do next—seal the life globe door once she stepped clear so it could be recalled to the mother ship, countless miles away. But seeing the broken promises which surrounded her, she decided . . .

No.

Instead, she wrestled a length of rebar from the wall which used to be into the opening behind her, blocking the door from fully rolling back and locking, stranding the vessel on Earth. The aliens would not get what they wanted until Jeri got what she wanted—answers.

And then, after picking through the rubble in search of the supplies she felt she’d need to survive the journey back to the daughter she’d left behind—and finding none—she headed toward home anyway.

• • • •

Evie, my love—

If you opened this letter at the time my scribbling on the outside of the envelope indicated, you today began your first job as an adult.

You’re not selling cookies or lemonade anymore, not dog walking, not babysitting, but actually out there in the world, getting a paycheck, supporting yourself. And if you’re lucky, you’ve figured out how to make that endless curiosity of yours work for you instead of against you, and found the place you’re meant to be, among the people who want the you you are. No more teachers angry you rewired the public address system so whenever the principal came on for morning announcements, messages would play urging students to protest human rights abuses, but instead being paid for your ability to take things apart and put them together better and stronger.

I’m proud of you. I’m sure your Dad is proud of you, too.

I hope you, once you get over your anger at my leaving, once you see what that absence has achieved, will be proud of me as well. I’ve been studying the Visitors, learning as much as I can about them before I go, so I can prove to them we deserve to be a part of the wider universe. Did you know they don’t eat meat? They’ve apparently evolved beyond killing anything, even animals. Can you believe it? I guess it’ll be a while before your Mom has a burger again. At least I now know not to ask for one. Who knows what else I need to know so I don’t embarrass myself out there?

I hope I don’t embarrass you, Evie. I hope I don’t embarrass us all.

But as for you, as for the latest, great milestone of yours—

Do I have any advice on how to do what comes next right? How to play well with others? So you can achieve all your dreams, and not just the ones which matter in the moment. I wish I did. I never played well with others, not even when I was a kid. I never played well with anyone until I met your father. Which is one reason you’re probably better off with me a million miles away. What do I know anyway?

Believe me, girl. The ad I answered after the Visitors came and made their offer? You’d have done the same. Save Earth and save yourself at the same time? Who gets a chance like that? That I was chosen out of all the millions of other applicants to give you this gift is nothing short of a miracle.

So work hard in the world I left behind, a world in which the aliens in my absence unleashed the secrets to clean air, pure water, a gift of information that will save us all. Hey, knowing you, remembering all the things around the house made more useful because of your touch, you might be the one to take what they give us and make it real. I hope I’ll get to see it.

What am I saying? Hope? I will see it! That’s the promise they made to me and the other forty-nine who’ll travel along with me.

And you, baby. Someday I’ll see you again. Keep being the best you can be in the brave new world I’m leaving (temporarily) behind.

Love,

Mom

• • • •

Jeri took shelter in the crater where Evie’s school used to be, and hoped whatever had imploded the building hadn’t been radioactive.

The destruction she discovered as she crossed the state from her induction center was overwhelming, and what was even more shocking: she’d encountered no one along the way, no one who could explain what had befallen Earth, how the secrets her species had been given yielded this.

She’d occasionally spy a survivor in the distance, but they would hide before she could reach and question them. So she’d learned nothing during her trip across the fractured terrain except—

There were survivors of whatever had gone bad. They were doing their best to live in the mess made of Earth, or at least the parts she’d crossed so far. Seeing them broke her heart, but at the same time it allowed her to think—Evangeline had to be alive, too. The girl she’d left behind was tough. If they could do it, so could she.

Jeri lay back against the slanted crater wall and looked up at the stars, which appeared clearer and brighter down in the depths than they’d seemed from the surface. It was hard to believe, in the midst of this wreckage, that she once had voyaged among them. It had been difficult enough to believe in the first place, but now, it made even less sense than before. All she could think was—

Something must have gone terribly wrong.

She and the others been told they’d been taken along as representatives of their species because they were being weighed to determine whether humanity was worthy of entry into a galactic federation, and yet, as far as she could tell, no formal testing had ever been done. Her trip felt like little more than a vacation in a tourist hotel, only one with views more beautiful than Jeri had ever seen outside of dream.

Alien worlds.

Civilizations more ancient than humanity.

Science so far advanced as to seem magic.

And though all the while, yes, she felt herself watched—watched as she and the others stared at starscapes no human had ever before seen, watched even as she chose the foods to eat from the bounty placed before them—she’d never felt weighed or judged. And yet, from the destruction around her, surely her band of space tourists must have failed. But what had they failed?

Jeri had no idea. She only knew she had failed.

She had failed her daughter. Before, during, and obviously by what she saw around her, even now.

Had the Visitors looked inside her as they’d traveled deep space, seen those moments when the wonders she saw pushed her daughter from her mind, and found her wanting because of it? Was she, was the whole world, being punished because she was human, and occasionally forgot to miss Evie? Because any of them privileged the universe over their families even for an instant? It was probably silly to think her moments of joy without her daughter could have doomed Earth, but considering the grit in her eyes and the rasp in her throat, her guilt was heavy.

And now her journey was almost over, and she was wondering—

Though she needed it, wanted it, wished it so, was Evie still alive?

Was her ex-husband?

It tortured her to not move the few final miles back to her home, hers and Evie’s, but so exhausted was she from her week on foot, she fell asleep looking at the stars, only to dream of the way she used to be before she’d traded one future for another.

• • • •

Dear Evie—

Today is your wedding day. I’m so glad you found someone worthy of you, someone who saw the you you are and decided you were perfect exactly the way you were. You see, until I found someone worthy of me, I wasn’t sure I was worthy. But when your father came into my life, everything changed.

I know it didn’t make sense when I tried explaining to you before, but he made me a better person, and gave me the strength to leave him. Which is weird, right? And not what we dream of when we dream of the day you’re about to experience. It’s not that he’s a bad person, as you’ve certainly learned during your time with him as your only Earthly parent. It’s just . . . we were right for each other and not right for each other at the same time. He gave me the freedom to learn I loved him but didn’t love him.

I hope the partner you’ve found will be right for you in all the right ways.

While you are bonding with your husband—or wife—you know it makes no difference to me, as long as you’re happy—I’m out here continuing to do the same with forty-nine others.

Why did the aliens choose fifty of us?

They haven’t let us know that yet. I figure it’s some magic number they’ve calculated that will allow them to see Earthlings in all their possibilities, the better to learn what our species is all about, and whether we should join them—all of us, not just a handful—out among the stars. At least, that’s what the scientists I’ve been hearing on the news have been saying. And I figure they must be right.

When I get back, I’ll tell you if they were.

Meanwhile, remember that I love you. And I love your new partner, too. If you think they’re worthy of you, I do as well. I look forward to meeting them.

Congratulations from the stars!

Love,

Your happy, hopeful mother

• • • •

As Jeri stumbled up the broken and overgrown cement pathway to what had been her home, her heart sank at the sight of the deteriorated building ahead. But considering the vast destruction she’d seen between her drop-off point and there, the vines running up through peeling paint were pitiably hopeful by contrast. The state of the house could have been far worse. Though the walls had begun to sink inward, the building was still recognizable as once having been a place where people—people, who now seemed so rare—had lived their lives.

She pulled at the handle of the loosely hanging front door, which fell from where it rocked on its hinges, and quickly made her way to her daughter’s room, ignoring the other damage as she headed to what mattered most. She found everything askew inside.

The mattress from her daughter’s bed, propped up against the window, blocked most of the light. The desk where Jeri had often helped with Evie’s homework, overturned. The wallboard which once held posters of rock stars, buckled and bare.

She knew better than to hope she’d find her daughter living there after all this time, all this unexplained devastation, but still, she hoped she’d at least find signs of how long it had been since she’d left, or if she was lucky, clues as to where she had gone. But any evidence which could help her understand what had happened was as absent as her daughter.

What kind of mother had she been to leave her daughter to this?

No better, she realized, than the aliens themselves.

She’d once thought the aliens wanted to be the parents of the universe, doing for all lifeforms what she was attempting to do for Earth. For Evie. Helping it be its best self. Giving her the environment and opportunity where she could be her best self. But it was clear something had gone wrong. And if given a chance, if she could somehow find her daughter again, she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for that.

She slid the mattress aside to the soggy carpeting so she could better see what contents of the room remained. There wasn’t much. She sifted through shards of broken glass, bent metal shelving, the exploded circuitry of an old computer, all of which brought back memories of when they had been whole and new, until, under a pile of damp, moldy clothes in the depths of the closet, she found the lunchbox she’d given her daughter, the one into which she’d once placed the letters she’d left behind.

She cradled it in her hands and found she could no longer stand.

She dropped to the mattress—partially from shock, partially from her exhaustion and the foul air, partially from hope—and balanced the dented box on her knees. She sighed in both recognition and resignation as she rubbed her fingers over the candy-colored horses imprinted on the surface.

Her first thought was—

How lucky it turned out to be after all, that she’d written letters rather than making a series of videos, for with anything other than paper, her messages would have been erased by the electromagnetic pulse which had apparently shut down the world.

She gave the box a shake, and hearing the rustle of papers inside, combined with feeling the weight of it in her hands, sensed it still contained the letters she’d left behind. She didn’t know what that meant.

She hoped Evie had managed to have a life before whatever stole Earth. She hoped some of the letters had needed to be read. But how far had her daughter gotten in her life? How many milestones had she achieved? And how many had she missed?

And why had the box been left behind, rather than having been taken along by Evie to wherever she ended up?

Jeri took a deep breath, and before she could bring herself to open the box, found herself praying, a thing she’d only begun to do once she’d first traveled to space. A thing that suddenly seemed even more important now.

• • • •

Oh, my dear, dear Evangeline—

You are a mother now.

You know what it feels like to love something more than you love yourself. To want someone to be better, stronger, safer than you ever were. To hope they’ll have a better life in a better world. And to feel in your gut you’d do anything to make that happen.

Anything.

I know, I know. You’re tired of hearing that. I’m sounding like what you’ve always insisted I was—I’m trying to justify my selfishness, to make an excuse for doing what I wanted to do anyway. And maybe that’s all it is. But that doesn’t matter now. Because whether my decision was born out of love or its absence, your world will be better because of my absence.

I can’t wait to walk that new world with you. With you and your child.

The second happiest day of my life will be when my mission ends, the human race is found, not wanting, but worthy, and I am sent back to see your faces. (You already know the happiest day.) So take good care of your little thing until we’re allowed to meet again. Take better care than I did, than I have.

I know we will have so much to catch up on.

Love,

Mom

(And also maybe . . . Grandma?)

• • • •

Jeri suddenly realized she could no longer remember how much time she’d spent sitting in what had once been her daughter’s room with a thumb on the clasp of the lunchbox. Surrounded by debris, crowded by memories, she kept flipping the metal tab up and down again, locking and unlocking, over and over, ready but never ready, wanting to know what was inside, but also dreading what was inside, unable to take that next step. It was only the knowledge that Evie was out there, had to be out there, needing her, which finally pushed her to take one last deep breath, and with shaking hands, lift the lid.

Atop a pile of familiar envelopes written many years and millions of miles before, once pristine but now covered with creases and filthy with fingerprints, was a single unfamiliar envelope, crumpled and grimy in its own way. On its front was the word “Mom” written in Evie’s handwriting, as neat as Jeri had ever seen it, which wasn’t that neat at all, for since she’d grown up at a keyboard—usually one she’d soldered together herself—her daughter’s penmanship wasn’t the best. But the neatness of the lettering meant her daughter must have tried her hardest.

Jeri quickly flipped through her own envelopes, and found each one slit open, the contents (presumably) read, then returned. Did the fact none of the missives had remained sealed mean in the years which Jeri had been gone, Evie had received all the good things a mother hopes for her daughter—a graduation, a good job, a wedding to a partner who loves them, a grandchild?

Her heart raced.

She took a deep breath, and began to read the letter her daughter had left behind.

• • • •

Dear Mom—

I tried to hold off on reading them, really I did. I resisted, hoping to wait to take each letter in turn, celebrating each of the milestones you’d hoped for by communing with you over paper and ink. Until I realized—what was the point?

Those things will never happen—a job, a husband, a family—a life. If I’d waited to read those letters until the times you’d planned for me to read those letters, well . . . I’d never have read those letters, you see.

It was all a lie. All of it. The Visitors didn’t come here to save us. They came here to destroy us. They were never our friends. They only pretended to be, in order to be better enemies.

And you never knew any of that as you flitted from star to star, did you, thinking you were being tested for the good of humanity, when it was all just a pretense? At least, I hope you never knew.

Or maybe you did come to know.

Maybe sometime after your ship took off, they let their masks fall out there, just as they did here.

The thing is . . . it wasn’t immediate for us.

The blueprints they gave us for power plants that would lift the world out of poverty? They poisoned the Earth instead.

The cures they promised would save us from our fragile flesh? They were only a curse.

We believed them, we trusted them, we let them slip under our defenses, until . . . we at long last had no defenses, which was their goal all along. To have us destroy most of what we had so we’d go to war over what was left.

Your journey was never intended to save us. Our species was not being tested. It was being eradicated. And we made it so easy for them. You and the others weren’t taken out there for a weighing of our species. It was only a charade. One they kept up only as long as necessary for those left behind to use their tech to kill ourselves for them, saving them the trouble of doing it themselves. They only wanted to learn as much from you as they could to make it easier to kill the next world.

If you return to read this letter—and there’s no guarantee you will, since if they’re willing to destroy a planet, why would they spare fifty of you once they got what they needed from you?—know that I forgive you. If they fooled the best of Earth, why should you be an exception? At this point, I can blame no one for being a fool. I was a fool, too.

I’ll try to hang on—more than hang on—until that return. If you return. And then, together, we can make the most of whatever time we have left.

Your daughter,

Evangeline

• • • •

Jeri was too stunned by the words she read, then read again, to do anything more than pull down her basically useless shirt collar and press the paper to her face, trying to smell her daughter there. But no trace of Evie remained, not there, not anywhere in the room’s disarray, not anyplace except her own heart and, she hoped, not too far away some as yet unexplored place on this benighted planet.

She folded the single sheet of paper, slid it back into its tattered envelope, and after kissing the word “Mom” her daughter had scribbled there, tucked it inside her shirt. Then she snapped shut the lunchbox containing her own remaining letters and hurled it through the window. She couldn’t bear their presence any longer. They’d become cursed to her. Once she’d thought their existence evidence of how much she loved her daughter, but now . . . now thinking of them brought her nothing but shame.

The aliens had lied to Earth, Earth and its governments had lied to her, and she, worst of all, had lied to herself. So excited was she for her role as a possible savior of the world, she ignored what should have been a red flag.

Because there was a glaring component to her trip which had never made any sense, and she’d chosen not to question it. She’d wondered from time to time while she’d been gone, but never often enough, why with all the advanced knowledge and technology the aliens had demonstrated, they hadn’t allowed contact between any of the volunteers and their families back home. The aliens could do so much, and offering that up should have been so easy. But it was one of the rules to which Jeri and the others had been forced to agree.

And yes, it made no sense then, though she hadn’t seen it. But it made sense now. The aliens kept them cut off because they didn’t want any of them to learn what was happening on the planet they’d left behind. Yet . . . if the destruction of the planet was the aliens’ plan all along, if the fifty had only been taken in the first place to fool Earth into feeling they were truly being considered for future wonders, why had they bothered to keep up the ruse with Jeri and the others the entire time she’d been gone? There was nothing they could have done about it out there to spoil the cosmic scam, so what was the point? Why even keep them alive? And why bother sending them back?

But she had neither answers nor the time to waste coming up with any, because Evie was out there somewhere. But where? She knew that if she kept searching for Evie, and Evie kept searching for her, chances are they’d never find each other, circling forever. Jeri’s only hope was if she stayed in place and let Evie come to her. But no, not here, in a squalid house that was only the memory of a home. Better to head back to where Evie would have been expecting her to appear, back where she’d be checking.

She retraced her steps to the intake building—or what remained of it anyway—where it had all begun. As she navigated around collapsed buildings, she thought of the truths Evie had revealed to her, and struggled with how it could be, how her keepers who she’d never seen harm another creature, human of otherwise, could have brought such destruction to Earth. And at night, as she slept in ditches, she dreamt of the pod which had brought her back to Earth, and how she could take shelter there, how it would keep her safe until she could find the answer to those questions. Only once she made her way across the broken land, she was shocked to discover . . . it was gone.

Could one or more of the survivors, who so far she’d seen only from a distance, have dragged it off? As she stood once more at the top of the broken stairs, she knew it was too heavy to have been taken far. She scanned the horizon, trying to pick out the pod amid the rubble, or the path it had etched in the grit, but spotted nothing.

But perhaps she’d been expecting too much of the humans who’d been left behind. Had an animal, though seemingly as rare as people, stumbled through the wreckage and accidentally knocked clear the piece of rubble she’d used to prevent the door from resealing and the pod from being returned? Was it already back in space with those who had tricked her?

Or—and Jeri shivered at where her mind went next, because—and this was too horrifying to contemplate—what if she and Evie had missed each other? What if her daughter had come here, arriving on her own journey even as Jeri had traveled back to a home which no longer existed, climbed inside the pod for clues to her mother’s whereabouts, and then been trapped inside, helpless, unable to do anything but ride back to the aliens? In the grip of that not knowing, Jeri was overcome with a grief beyond any she’d felt so far.

She had just enough time to swipe away some debris from the broken steps of the building before she sank down, overcome by exhaustion, by sadness, and by the lack of oxygen that made it difficult for her to cope with either. She could hold herself together no longer, and collapsed into unconsciousness.

• • • •

Until she woke, first to the sound of the clinking of stones down the steps, then to her daughter’s voice.

“Mom!”

“Evie,” she said, more prayer than greeting, and when she inhaled after saying the syllables of her daughter’s name, the air tasted fresher than it had since landing. She lifted a hand to her face to find, rather than the cloth with which she had wrapped herself to stomach the foul air, a mask, thick with circuits, stretching from the bridge of her nose to beneath her chin.

She reached up and pulled her daughter close, and though there were so many things she wanted to say, so many years she had to make up for, the only words she found she could utter were, “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be,” said Evie, her face hidden as well. Her daughter’s clothing was so soiled she was almost invisible against the world behind her, and Jeri couldn’t tell whether the effect was deliberate camouflage or merely the result of living an Earth life. “I’m the one who needs to apologize. I should have been here to meet you when you returned. But there was still so much to do. I had to keep scavenging.”

“That’s how you made this, isn’t it?” said Jeri, touching her face mask once again. “All that tinkering you used to do. I guess it paid off, huh?

Evie nodded.

“Still,” Evie continued. “I should have been there for you. So don’t feel sorry, Mom. This wasn’t your fault. None of it. This was theirs.”

Evie tilted her head back and looked up at the gray sky, as if she could see through the grit which now circled the Earth all the way to those who’d made it that way. Jeri could see the old familiar anger in her eyes, anger which had often been focused on her before she’d left. She was glad it was pointed somewhere else now.

“Evie, your father. Did he . . . “

She couldn’t bring herself to say anymore. Evie turned her gaze from the skies, turned toward Jeri, and slowly shook her head, telling her what she guessed she already knew.

Damn them all.

“I still can’t believe they caused all this,” said Jeri, as much to herself as to her daughter. “I never saw them kill, and they never let us kill, not even for food, which I always thought was part of the test. I saw no evidence they were even capable of such a thing.”

“They might not be . . . but they knew how to do everything necessary to get us to do it for them.”

“How did you survive?” asked Jeri, thinking back to the luxury the aliens had used to lie to her, and comparing it to the squalor around her. “There don’t seem to be many who did, and none who gave me the chance to talk to them so I could find out how they managed.”

“Some of it was thanks to the scavenging, and to making tools like these.” She gestured at their faces. “The rest . . . I don’t want to tell you. And you don’t want to know. No one should have to know. And we’re going to make sure no one ever has to know anything like that again.”

“Oh, Evie. There’s nothing we can do, no matter how good you are, just the two of us with scraps. If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d know.”

“Come, Mom. I’ll show you what I know.”

Her daughter leapt up, then held out a hand to pull Jeri from the uneven step and to her feet. It felt easier for Jeri to move now, easier to breathe, thanks to what her daughter had created. Evie turned and began to make her way through the rubble, walking a path Jeri would not have been able to pick out as one had her daughter not walked ahead.

Jeri could tell her daughter was moving more slowly than she would have liked so she could keep up with her, so she picked up her speed. Eventually, in an alcove beneath a shelter constructed of rubble, she saw her pod again.

Or what used to be her pod.

The sight reminded her of the spreads she’d often found taking up the dining room table or the entirety of Evie’s bedroom floor—bits and pieces of toys and computers, appliances and power tools, displays which always filled Jeri with anxiety until they were put back together better than before. Looking at the mess that had been made of her pod, though, she was surprised she felt no anxiety now.

No rebar was needed to keep the door jammed open any longer, for the door was no longer even attached to the body of the small ship. It lay curved to one side, the interior circuitry which had once controlled it running like vines spreading across the floor and walls of the alcove, interwoven with unfamiliar tech, all lit in the dim space only by the pulsing of the pod’s power source.

“What are you up to, Evie? There were no weapons in the pod. You can’t fight them with this. You can’t fight them period.”

“I don’t plan to fight them.”

“Then what—”

“This is something I’ve been planning the whole time you’ve been gone. It’s a path I’ve been on even before I knew there was a path. All my schooling, for as long as there was schooling, all the knowledge gained by my experimenting, all my recycling of the broken bits of a vanished world—they’ve all led me to this. The aliens may have destroyed the Earth, and it’s too late for me to do anything about that, but I’m not going to let them do the same anywhere else. And you’ve come home with exactly the missing pieces I need.”

Evie ran her hand along the curve of the pod, broken here and there where she had split the casing. Wires ran out connecting it to the grid which surrounded them. Jeri could tell her daughter was able to see something far beyond what was there.

“There’s no way we were the first they did this to, sneaking in and coopting us so we’d destroy ourselves. And we certainly weren’t the last. When they were done with us, they went on to the next. But no more.”

“Evie, whatever you think you’ve done, they’re doing, you can’t possibly stop them. The things I’ve seen . . . the things I haven’t had the chance to tell you, but will if you’ll only listen. You can’t fight them. And when they realize what’s been done and come looking for the pod—”

“We’ll no longer be here. Because I’m not going to fight them. We’re not going to fight them. What we’re going to be, Mom, is a wake-up call. We’re going out there. We’re going to warn the others, so when the aliens show up offering gifts to their planets, they’ll be ready. Ready to say no. Ready to band together to defeat them. Because even if one race can’t fight back against our visitors, all of them together can. We’re going to make sure no one else will ever be fooled the same way we were. No more parents will be intentionally separated from their children. No more planets will have to die.”

Evie started reeling in the strings of familiar and unfamiliar technology and began packing it into the open shell of the pod. Jeri looked at the spread of equipment Evie had disassembled and tried to see what she could see.

“Can you really do this?”

“I’ve already almost done it. I’m your daughter, aren’t I?”

“Yes. Yes, you are.”

Evie smiled, the first time Jeri had seen her do so in a long while, and because it had been so long, it hurt, but in a good way.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, I’ve got this.”

Jeri nodded, realizing what she was going to do with the time she had left on Earth. There was one last letter she needed to write.

• • • •

To whoever finds this letter, if ever this letter is found—

There is nothing more for you here. Everything that remained of value, everything that wasn’t already taken from us, I have already taken.

My daughter.

If you are reading this—if you managed to find one of the copies I placed at various points around the planet—if you are holding it in your hands or tentacles or whatever body part you use to navigate the universe because you stumbled across the husk of Earth while out exploring, and you are among those who have yet to encounter the Visitors who destroyed our world, know this—you will.

And know also—they are not to be trusted.

They will tell you they will save you from yourselves if a few of you will volunteer to be taken and judged and possibly found worthy, but the only reason they seek volunteers is to learn how best to fool the next species even as they are crushing the last one. So do not believe them. They are cowards. I realize that now.

They lie to themselves, tell themselves they are a higher order of being because they don’t kill, but instead connive species to kill themselves for them. Which is why they allowed me and the others they borrowed to return home, because they wouldn’t even cross the line to erase us, so they could continue to tell themselves how moral they are.

And yet—the others who traveled with me are all, as far as I can tell, still dead, and whether the Visitors did it themselves or allowed the Earth they helped bring into being do it for them doesn’t matter.

I alone seem to have survived. Why? Because I had an Evie, and they did not.

So it’s all a lie, all of it. Because in reality, they have concocted this ruse because they aren’t strong enough to defeat you, which means their only hope of conquering you is if they can trick you into defeating yourselves.

Reject them.

And then once you’ve rejected them, find the other species like yourself, civilizations that to these aliens are little more than future victims. Band together. For I know, we know, you can do together what you could never do alone.

No one should have to lose what I lost.

If, however, you are reading this and are already like us, and have somehow managed to be survivors of an otherwise destroyed world as we were . . . I’m sorry. We cannot return this world, nor your world, to what they once were. But take solace in the fact we are making sure nothing like this will ever happen again.

On the other hand, if you are reading this because you’re the ones who ripped me away from my daughter, and ripped our planet away from both of us, and have returned to check on the results of your sabotage, know this—

We are coming for you. And soon the whole universe will be coming for you.

So no one else will ever have to write a letter like this again.

Geraldine of Earth

Evangeline’s Mother