And underneath the hangar, pieces of a ship that had crashed almost fifty years ago. But it was meaningless to the Earthbound. It didn't make sense. It was incomprehensible. No controls, no seats, nothing resembling a life pod or stasis chamber, no engine, no landing gear. A shell. Worthless, but secret still.

This man had deeper secrets than the craft he had once piloted. Deeper secrets than the young who had gestated in that same craft and emerged cloaked in human flesh and caught up in it still. He envied them. At least they live human lives, even if underneath they were still connected to the All. His secret was his destination. 5667 Vista Drive. His wife. His child. The only family he had left. He had run away a coward. He had returned with a determination to teach his human issue the power of heritage, of blood, so that when the Hunters came for his child, as he knew they would, the child would be ready.

The streets were quiet, he drove slowly, taking it all in. The Crashdown, the High School, the Post Office. He used buying stamps there, mail packages...remembrances of a time when he had almost reached normalcy, when he thought perhaps this could work, that he could be happy. Then word had come from one of the others. Hunters, following his trail. So he had gone without a word, heading north into Canada then down South into Mississippi. He hadn't felt them in months, almost a year. It meant nothing. They were trapped here, same as the others. They had nothing else to do with their exile but track, seek, destroy, track, seek, destroy. The blood must be kept pure. All those who disobey are to be eliminated, whereupon they would return to the All and face punishment. The All knew where their lost ones had landed. They were curious about this world, tacked on to the outer arm of an outer galaxy. The stellar equivalent of a foreign immersion program. They wouldn't be coming for them any time soon.

"Fuck you," he whispered, tired to his very marrow of hiding. Sooner or later the Hunters too would find the secret at 5667 Vista. He had to do something. It occured to him that by the time he reached the All that he would be barely recognizeable as one of the Fold. He was a man now, turning human in his heart. Soon he would be like the children in the crash, inmeshed in almost believing that the All had been but a dream. Almost. This planet was wild, magnificent and humbling. Not like the structured blue plains of Amsar, with its sparkling megaliths and astrophysic-designed houses. The Earthbound were viciously intelligent and agressively unaware. They liked their aliens either far away or getting their otherwordly asses kicked soundly in summer blockbusters. They would not believe it until they saw it. But in Roswell, it was all around them.

He passed a stately two-story. The Evans house. The staccato hum of the two adopted Fold children tickled his spine. Aliens can sense their own kind. Further on down, a left on Ventura. The Desert Cactus Trailer Park. The pulse of a third child struck him in the neck, but he drove on. The fourth seemed absent, at least for the moment.

Down Gila, a right on Cielo. Through two traffic lights. Vista Drive.

He parked down the street from the house and walked to the front door. Doorbell or a simple knock? He closed his eyes, stretched his conciousness out through the darkened windows, into the darkened rooms. They slept. He searched for his child's Alien rhythm. There. Almost undetectable from the steady rasp of the running dishwasher in the kitchen he and his wife had tiled. He doubted that any of the crash children had picked up on it, it was so light. It might be mistaken for a rustle of leaves, for the distant bass of a stereo, the crackle of electrical current through wires, the strange aural disturbance of a muted television. He felt it because he strained for it. Everything seemed more solid now, less tenuous. There could be no doubting it; his child retained the strength of the Fold.

Had the child ever, he wondered, opened a door without touching it? Cracked dishware when angry? Slivered a mirror when caught up in teenaged self-hatred? Had these things been dismissed, put aside, forgotten?

He knocked. Softly at first. He sensed it; they slept on. Harder then, and harder, until he was banging his fist against the buckling white-painted wood and the hall light came on, trapping him in its yellow glare.

The door swung open. There she was, his lovely wife, in that same silly blue bathrobe with the sheep on it. She looked at him, then staggered back, a low keening slipping from her throat.

"Mom?" A new voice. Every muscle in his body tensed. He hadn't seen his baby in nearly sixteen years. "Mom, who is it?"

And there she was, standing just behind her mother, beautiful in her almost-womanhood and so innocent, so just-out-of-bed off-guard that he almost began to weep that instant.

"Marcos." Amy's voice was shrill, confused. "Marcos."

His daughter's eyes were as wide as saucers. She knew his name. She'd written it a thousand times on a thousand sheets of paper.