that way, and so is Luna.”
Chloe picked a bed. It was the other side of the room from the ones Luna and Kevin had chosen.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she said, “but I don’t know you, and…” She shook her head, not finishing that. There was a haunted look to her as she did it.
“Are you okay?” Kevin asked.
“I’m fine,” Chloe shot back, but then softened her voice a little. “I’m fine. I’ve just been used to looking after myself for a while. I guess I’m not very good at opening up to people.”
“Okay,” Kevin said. He stepped back toward the door. “I can go if you don’t want to—”
“I ran away from home,” Chloe said. It was enough to stop Kevin where he was.
“What?”
“I mean, before the aliens came,” Chloe continued. “My mom shouted at me all the time, and my dad was… well, some stuff happened, and they all said I was crazy… anyway, I have a cousin up north. I thought if I could get to him, I’d be okay, and then the aliens came.”
To Kevin, it sounded like she was skimming over a lot of stuff, but he let it go. A lot of the pauses had the feeling of gaps that hid the kind of stuff that hurt too much, as if pretending would make it all go away. He knew about that. Like if he pretended everything was fine, his illness wasn’t really there.
“How did you survive out there?” Kevin asked.
“I did what I had to,” Chloe said, sounding defensive, and also kind of haunted again. “Wait, you mean when everyone else changed? I was… I guess it was just luck. I was inside away from everyone when it started happening, and people said there was a gas or something, but by the time I got out, it was just those things trying to grab people and breathe on them.”
“By the time you got out?” Kevin said.
“This butcher locked me in his meat locker. Said I was trying to steal from him.”
Was that somewhere that might keep the alien vapor out? Did it mean that Luna and he didn’t need their masks anymore?
“It will be okay,” Kevin said.
Chloe gave him another of those shrugs. “You’re the kid on TV, aren’t you? When you said your name was Kevin, I didn’t get it, but I think I recognize you. Is that why you’re here? They stashed you in a safe place because you’re the boy who knows about aliens?”
Kevin shook his head, moving back over to her. “They didn’t put me here. Dr. Levin gave me a key to fit the bunkers they have, and told me about the one under the NASA research center, but that went wrong. Luna and I had to find this place by ourselves.”
Chloe nodded. “Luna… is she your girlfriend?”
People were always assuming that. Kevin couldn’t understand why. It seemed obvious to him that Luna would never be his girlfriend.
“She’s my friend,” Kevin said. “We’re not… I mean…”
It was weird how talking about aliens was easier than talking about exactly what he and Luna were.
“Strange,” Chloe said. “I mean, you seem nice. I definitely wouldn’t leave you as just a friend. I wonder—”
Kevin didn’t get to find out what she wondered, though, because a pointed cough came from the doorway. Almost as pointed as the look Luna gave them when Kevin turned around.
“I wanted to see what was taking you both so long,” she said, and she didn’t sound happy. She looked… almost jealous, and that didn’t make sense, because nothing was happening here, and in any case, Kevin and Luna weren’t like that. Were they?
“Hi, Luna,” Kevin said. “Chloe was just telling me about herself.”
“I bet she was,” Luna said. “Maybe she can tell me some of it too. And maybe, while we’re doing that, we can work out what we’re all going to do next.”
They went through to the kitchen area, because none of them had eaten breakfast yet. Kevin went to get supplies from the storeroom, not entirely sure if he should leave Luna and Chloe alone right then.
Kevin picked out a packet that claimed to be blueberry pancakes, and took it out to them. They were quiet, which was kind of worrying in itself—Luna was almost never quiet.
“I found blueberry pancakes,” he said.
“That’s great,” Luna said. “I love blueberry pancakes.”
“I like them too,” Chloe said, although Kevin got the feeling she’d only said it because Luna had.
“Well, I don’t know how good they’ll be,” Kevin said.
The answer to that was simple: they tasted like something that had been in a packet in a storeroom for longer than they should have been. Even so, he was hungry enough by then to eat all of his.
“How did you hear about this place?” Kevin asked Chloe while they were eating.
“My dad… his job meant that he… heard things,” she said, but didn’t expand on it more than that. Kevin suspected that if Luna had asked rather than him, she wouldn’t have said even that much.
“So you trekked here, and battered on the door until someone let you in?” Luna said. She didn’t sound to Kevin as though she believed it much.
“I had to go somewhere,” Chloe said.
“I wonder if there are other places like this where people have managed to hide out,” Kevin said before that could turn into an argument. He wanted them to get along, if they were stuck there.
“If there are, we can’t contact them,” Luna said. “There’s still no signal coming in through the screens, and all those communications devices are useless if we don’t know who we’re connecting to.”
“Maybe you’re just not turning them on right,” Chloe said.
Luna gave her a pointed look.
“We can stay here as long as we need to, anyway,” Luna said. “We’re safe here. We talked about this yesterday, Kevin.”
They had, and it had been a comforting thought at the time, but was that it? Were the three of them just going to stay there for the rest of their lives?
“I might know about a place,” Chloe said, between mouthfuls of pancake.
“You just happen to know about somewhere?” Luna said. “The same way that you heard about here?”
To Kevin, she sounded suspicious. He wanted to give Chloe the benefit of the doubt, but Luna sounded much less like she trusted her.
Chloe put down her fork. “I heard about it on the way here from some people I met. I figured that this was closer, and safer. But if there’s no one here…”
“We’re here,” Luna said. “We’re safe here.”
“Are
