and take her hand. The memory accumulates around me, first just a faint smell and a few sounds, but it builds until I’m there in their space ship.

The machines are beeping. Beeping so fast and so loud it can only mean something bad is about to happen. My Other squeezes my hand. There isn’t much else we can do. We’re strapped down to our padded mats and everything happening around us is way beyond our control. I squeeze my eyes shut and just try to breathe. Willprotectmetillhislastbreath grunts from the pilot seat. I can hear the faint thoughts emanating from him, thoughts that are filled with anger and panic and sadness. I can see Lovesmemorethanherself drift in and out of them as he pulls levers and smashes buttons. It feels warm inside the ship now. It’s not supposed to be warm.

I resist the urge to rip off the harness and buckles keeping me secured down and go to Willprotectmetillhislastbreath. My Other is fighting the urge herself too. ‘I don’t want to die like this.’ She tells me and I grip her hand tighter. ‘We won’t die.’ I repeat it over and over again because it has to be true. We can’t die because Willprotectmetillhislastbreath is supposed to save Lovesmemorethanherself. That’s not just the plan, that’s the promise. We can’t die while we’re so far apart, but the machines are beeping and I’m drenched in sweat because our ship is on fire and we are burning up.

A high pitched wailing sound rattles through the ship as the whole thing starts to shake. A cry slips past my lips as the ship sharply rolls to the left side and the harnesses bite into my skin. My Other is squeezing my hand so tight I’m positive I’m going to have bruises from it. The ship is coming apart. I hear Willprotectmetillhislastbreath as he desperately tries to right us, but I can 

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feel it in the way the ship is vibrating around us—we’ve lost an engine. We are going to crash. There’s no fixing the damage, there’s no saving us.

My Other lets out a sob and her fear resonates through me. I want to tell her not to be afraid, but I can’t formulate the thought. The only thing I can hear is the pounding of my heart echoed by Willprotectmetillhislastbreath pounding on the console. He will keep trying until his last breath to fix this because that’s who he is, even if it’s hopeless.

The noise reaches an explosive crescendo and then the world goes black.

Kelsey pulls her hand away and the intensity of the terrible memory fades away. I breathe in slowly as I dissect all the information I can from it. Kelsey and Lainey had still been children then. I try to do a little bit of quick math to put a date to the moment. I’m positive that the twins are in their twenties and that the memory is maybe a decade old. How old would I have been during their moment of crisis? It’s too close for it not to be a possibility… “What year was that?” I need to know because if what I think is right then all the secrets that my dad had kept from me will be that much more bitter.

The twins share a look, “2010.” They say in unison. It hits me like a punch in the gut. It can’t be a coincidence. “Why?” Lainey asks suspiciously the same time Kelsey says “Are you okay?”

I nod my head, “The last time I was in Sandy Springs was in 2010.” I can see their expressions are first confused and then it also dawns on them. It can’t be a coincidence that we’d all been so close together at the same time. And now that I think about it, it doesn’t make any sense at all that Dad and I ever came here in the first place. His entire motto at the time had been 

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for us to stay as far away from others of our kind as much as possible. So much so that I had actually grown up wondering if there even were other aliens on Earth besides the two of us. But now I’m learning that there’s a whole underground network of refugee aliens living on Earth and they just so happen to be based not far from this little town. There’s no way that Dad wouldn’t have known that. Why else would he have dragged us out here if not to see them? Why? Why? Why?

The question rattles around in my brain leaving little room for any other thought. Lainey touches my arm drawing me back to the present though. “You promised.” She reminds me and I remember that I had promised to show them a memory of my own.

Grudgingly I extend my hand out and let them in.

It hurts! Everything hurts! I cry out and it’s all I can do to just breathe. Tristan grips my hand in an iron-clad grasp. He is in as much as pain as I am, but he doesn’t say a thing about it. He just holds me while the retired nurse we’d paid off urges me to push and to keep pushing and by the stars I am! I want to scream at her that I am. That I am trying, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be just the two of us on this big planet completely isolated from our own kind. I cry out again and desperately wish that my mother was here, that any of my family was here, but they’re not. They’re on the other side of the universe and I’m here. No doctors, no medicine, in a tiny little cottage in the middle of nowhere.

“Just breathe.” Tristan urges me, but he says it and doesn’t think it. That doesn’t help. I want him with me, not just beside me. Theotherhalfofmyheart, please! I want to beg him, but I can’t think either. It’s all I can do to focus on making sure the baby arrives alive and healthy.