Page 22 of Love at First Sighting
“Huh,” she says. “I didn’t notice that before.”
The door in the hillside looks like it’s hiding some kind of underground bunker, much like the one we have below the PIS office. LA is full of all kinds of offbeat architecture and new pseudo-environmentalist designs, but as we step closer, I realize this isn’t someone’s house. This is a government archive. No…judging by the logo on the door, it’s aPISarchive.
“Shit.” I sigh.
“What?”
“This…this is one of the archives we use.” I rub the back of my neck. “The PIS office isn’t very big, so we don’t store our old files on-site. We store them in regional locations, and I think this might be one of ours.”
El narrows her eyes. “And you didn’t know about this before?”
“Not the exact location, no. My security clearance hardly gets me into a post office.” We’ve always been told it’s on a need-to-know basis, and I’ve never needed to know. “Look.”
I take careful steps forward, wondering if there’s any kind of security setup, but I don’t spy any cameras attached to the building.
El and I approach the door. “This was the logo I saw on the craft. It’s your logo. The piss logo.”
“P-I-S,” I correct.
“The letters with the three stars. This was etched on the inside of the thing that crashed, but it was cut off. I only got the first two letters. Whatever this was, it belonged to you guys. Like a security drone.”
Logically, it makes sense, but PIS having any kind of advanced technology when our cars are practically heaps of scrap metal and we hardly have a working Keurig machine makes no sense. I’m hearing her, but for the first time since I saw El’s video, I’m not really believing her. I might buy that shedidsee a UFO before I buy that anyone at PIS can navigate a drone. Or even knows what one is…
“A drone?” I laugh. “El…do we look like we havedrones? You’ve seen my car. I wear suspenders, for fuck’s sake. We do not havedrones.”
“Then explain this.” El holds up her phone, and the burnt PIS logo stares back at me. It’s damaged enough that I could debate it, but the longer I look at it, the harder it is to deny. It’s the PIS logo, loud and clear. “This isyourlogo, like on your badge. Guarding a door with that same logo on it.”
Her voice picks up speed and I recognize the desperationin her eyes as the same desire I have to know what happened to my dad. Idon’tbelieve her, but I have to try.
Trying to believe her means trying to accept the fact that the things I don’t know about PIS could be worse than I thought. For an organization with one foot in the Stone Age and the other hardly sticking a toe into the Cold War, I figure I’d know if they had any kind of advanced technology. They would probably ask me to fix the damn drones or complain when they crashed one into a side of a mountain.
I’ve never been naive enough to believe my bosses weren’t doing suspicious shit. I know it comes with working for the government, especially when my job is to keep secrets. We allpretendwe don’t know anything about aliens, and legally have to say we don’t, but the most important thing we can do as PIS agents is exactly what we’re told. Marcus taught me on day one that everyone who tries to speak out about their sightings ultimately regrets it.
“El, I…”
“You believed me before,” she asserts. “Please. You’re the only person who does. Theonlyperson who doesn’t think I’m crazy.”
That draws me back in.Crazy. A word used to discredit so easily. PIS has always had a penchant for hit pieces, for digging into someone’s history of mental illness, for casting social mobs on people until they shut up. I think of how many people I tried to tell about my accident. No one believed a wounded ten-year-old when he said he saw something strange.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. You’re right. There’s just…I have a lot of questions, El. PIS is not a high-tech place.Iam their IT department. We don’t have scientists; we have a bunch of old guys and wannabe cops who stalk people.”
“So, what do we do now?” she says. And she sounds sodamn sad that we’ve hit a brick wall. I have to do something. I can’t give up here.
“Can I show you something?”
El nods.
I reach inside and open up my camera roll. I uploaded and saved the photo quickly when I got home that night, at my dad’s request. We made two copies and he told me to keep the photoverysafe and not tell anyone about it. I’ve never understood what it meant, but I knew it was the first thing I’d grab if my house were on fire. He’d always been paranoid, and I knew it likely came from working a job where he knew and kept too many secrets. I fully uploaded the photo onto my phone the other night, knowing I’d need the best version to reference now.
“This…” I start, then halt. It feels like I’m passing a part of my soul to someone in a way I never have before. Not even Marcus knows about this picture or what I saw that night. And I sure as hell haven’t whipped this out with other girls. Nothing kills the mood like a photo that reminds me of my dead dad. Half the women I’ve dated didn’t even make it to the point where they learned Ihadno parents.
El’s already set her eyes on the photo, so it’s too late to turn back now. “This is whatyousaw?”
Her voice is soft—so much gentler than anything else I’ve heard from her. It makes me want to trust her to handle me with care.
“Looks a lot like what you saw, huh?”
She nods. “Almost identical. How do you know it’s connected?”
