line to this alien place?”
If Luna ever acquired a superpower, it would probably be the ability to leap tall conclusions in a single bound. Kevin liked that about her, especially when it meant that she was the one person who might believe him, but even so, it felt like a lot to decide, so quickly.
“You know how crazy that sounds, right?” he said.
“No crazier than the idea that the world is just going to snatch my friend away for no good reason,” Luna shot back, her fists clenched in a way that suggested she would happily fight it over the issue. Or maybe just clenched with the effort of not crying again. Luna tended to get angry, or make jokes, or do crazy things rather than be upset. Right then, Kevin couldn’t blame her.
He watched her coming down from whatever nearly crying space she was in, winding down from it piece by piece and forcing a smile into the space instead.
“So, terrible disease, cool visions of alien worlds… is there anything else you aren’t telling me?”
“Just the numbers,” Kevin said.
Luna looked at him with obvious annoyance. “You get that you weren’t supposed to say yes there?”
“I wanted to tell you everything,” Kevin said, although he guessed it was probably a bit late now. “Sorry.”
“Okay,” Luna said. Again, Kevin had the sense of her working to process it all. “Numbers?”
“I see them too,” Kevin said. He repeated them from memory. “23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59.”
“Okay,” Luna said. She pursed her lips. “I wonder what they mean.”
That they might not mean anything seemed not to occur to her. Kevin loved that about her.
She had her phone out. “It’s not right for a license plate, and it would be weird for a password. What else?”
Kevin hadn’t thought about it, at least not with the kind of directness that Luna seemed to be applying to the problem.
“Maybe like an item number, a serial number?” Kevin suggested.
“But there are hours and minutes there,” Luna said. She seemed utterly caught up in the problem of what it might mean. “What else?”
“Maybe like a delivery time and a location?” Kevin suggested. “Those second parts sound like they might be coordinates.”
“It’s not quite right for a map reference,” Luna said. “Maybe if I just Google it… oh, cool.”
“What?” Kevin asked. One look at Luna’s face said that they’d hit the jackpot.
“When you type that string of numbers into a search engine, you only get results about one thing,” Luna said. She made it sound so certain like that. She turned her phone to show him, the pages set out in a neat row. “The Trappist 1 star system.”
Kevin could feel his excitement building. More than that, he could feel his hope building. Hope that this might really mean something, and that it wasn’t just his illness, no matter what anyone said. Hope that it might actually be real.
“Why would I see those numbers, though?” he asked.
“Maybe because the Trappist system is supposed to be one of the ones that have a chance of harboring life?” Luna said. “From what it says here, there are several planets there in what we think is a habitable zone.”
She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The idea of planets that might have life seemed like too much to be a coincidence when Kevin had seen that life. Or seen some strange life, at least.
“You need to talk to someone about this,” Luna declared. “You’re… like, the first proof of extraterrestrial contact, or something. Who were those people looking for aliens, the scientists? I saw a thing about them on TV.”
“SETI?” Kevin said.
“Those are the ones,” Luna said. “Aren’t they based in San Francisco, or San Jose, or something?”
Kevin hadn’t known that, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea tugged at him.
“You have to go, Kevin,” Luna said. “You have to at least talk to them.”
“No,” his mother said, setting her coffee down so firmly it spilled. “No, Kevin, absolutely not!”
“But Mom—”
“I’m not driving you to San Francisco so that you can bother a bunch of nutjobs,” his mother said.
Kevin held out his phone, showing the information about SETI on it. “They aren’t crazy,” he said. “They’re scientists.”
“Scientists can be crazy too,” his mother said. “And this whole idea… Kevin, can’t you just accept that you’re seeing things that aren’t there?”
That was the problem; it would be all too easy to accept it. It would be easy to tell himself that this wasn’t real, but there was something nagging away at the back of his brain that said it would be a really bad idea if he did. The countdown was still going, and Kevin suspected that he needed to talk to someone who would believe him before it reached its end.
“Mom, the numbers I told you I was seeing… they turned out to be the location for a star system.”
“There are so many stars out there that I’m sure any random string of numbers would connect to one of them,” his mother said. “It would be the same as the mass of the star or… or, I don’t know enough about stars to know what else, but it would be something.”
“I don’t mean that,” Kevin said. “I mean it was exactly the same. Luna put the numbers in and the Trappist 1 system was the first thing to come out. The only thing to come out.”
“I should have known that Luna would be involved,” his mother said with a sigh. “I love that girl, but she has too much imagination for her own good.”
“Please, Mom,” Kevin said. “This is real.”
His mother reached out to put her hands on his shoulders. When had she started having to reach up to do that? “It’s not, Kevin. Dr. Yalestrom said that you were having trouble accepting all this. You have to understand what’s going on, and I have to help you to accept it.”
“I know I’m dying, Mom,” Kevin said. He shouldn’t have put it like that, because he could see the tears rising in his mother’s eyes.
“Do you? Because this—”
“I’ll find a way to get there,” Kevin promised. “I’ll take a bus if I have to. I’ll take a train into the city and walk. I have to at least talk to them.”
“And get laughed at?” His mother pulled away, not looking at him. “You know that’s what will happen, right, Kevin? I’m trying to protect you.”
“I know you are,” Kevin said. “And I know that they’ll probably laugh at me, but I have to at least try, Mom. I have the feeling that this is really
