It was deathly quiet when Beri got out of the car at the base of the White Pace’s steps. The quiet stayed when he mounted them, and when guards and heralds opened the doors for him to enter. Inside, it was even quieter. He swore he could hear the ghosts. Everyone was gone. Not even Mother and Nikki were here, and they were the only ones left alive; not even his own mother wanted to be in the same house with him.

  Hell, he wasn’t sure he wanted her, either. Anyone but her. He’d thought she loved him, and maybe what she’d decided for him was honestly the best thing for him—but he wouldn’t do it. He refused to go back on his word and take Tinna for a wife. A Sidhe oath should mean something.

  He walked back to the throne room, his footsteps echoing in the gssed-in corridor that would usually be filled with people who weren’t friends of his. All the repairs hadn’t yet been completed; the sun disk that usually hung behind the throne had been taken away. What good was a throne when you didn’t have anyone next to you? He didn’t want it, had never wanted it, but it was his anyway.

  Solis would have been better for everyone. It would have been better if the ogres hadn’t found her, and found Beri instead—but—

  “Boss?” That was Dave, behind him.

  He turned and looked down into golden eyes: big, vulnerable eyes in a face that must have crumpled when Dave heard Katie was dead.

  “They took her,” he said. “I saw them take her. She’s not—”

  “Boss,” Dave said, a mild rebuke and gentle concern at the same time.

  Beri turned on his heel and stalked out. He knew what he’d seen. He knew, but not one single person believed him. Katie would’ve, he told himself, even if it wasn’t true, but she already did, because she had also seen the not-Romuns. For sure, Katie would’ve at least checked it out, not simply dismissed him as a madman.

  His chambers mocked him with their sameness. They shouldn’t be the same. Nothing in his head felt that way. Katie would believe me. More, he realized. More.

  There wouldn’t have been anything standing in her way. She simply wouldn’t have allowed it. He sat hard on the edge of his midnight-blue bed. There was a picture in the drawer of his nightstand, Katie at 14 in his very first car, Beri in the driver’s seat, 16 and freer than he’d felt since. They wore matching sungsses. It was one of his favorites, but they all were. He hadn’t looked through the albums—had had them shoved in the back of a closet. They hurt too much; the thought of them was a ragged wound right now.

  Nothing would have stood between Katie and him. How could he forget her? She was the st. The only one left, and the scrutiny he knew he would face for trying to save her seemed less frightening than living his life alone.

  He wiped his face with the sleeve of the suit jacket and went to boot up his computer.

  Twelve hours ter, steady, unmoving light shone over his face from all three monitors. Google had led him down strange avenues as usual; on one monitor, he scrolled through yet another page of personal testimonies about the Greys. On the second, a collection of thumbnail images from the depths of Geocities showed details of cattle mutitions. The third pyed a bootleg stream of Mars Attacks!.

  None of this stuff was even close to what he wanted. He scowled, shoving his hand deep into a bag of Doritos and stuffing whatever he grabbed into his mouth. Five empty Monster cans, straight from the minifridge under his desk, littered beneath the monitors. He had to think about this in a different way, clearly, because he’d gotten nothing except a fervent sense of relief that Katie didn’t look like a cow.

  He popped another can of Monster and leaned back to reassess somehow, running over what the aliens had done. A ser with the power of iron is ridiculous, he thought. That sounds like a story. No wonder nobody believed me—but I saw it. Some kind of sympathetic magic? He opened another tab over the cattle mutitions and gulped from his drink; he imagined he felt the energy charging into his veins as he scrolled through page after page of results about the Iron Beam defense system. Somewhere around page 40, he found something else: an ancient video uploaded to YouTube with green blurs in the thumbnail. They were the precise color he remembered.

  Beri clicked it open in a new tab, slurping again while it loaded. There was no indication of who might be behind the camera; the title was Scape Ore Swamp June 6, 1998. There was no description, and the footage was grainy and dark, but the straight green bands of the sers were unmistakable. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to be seeing, but hisses and pops—and a few distinct grunts, enough he thought the hisses weren’t all due to the format and age—sounded from the video. He watched it again and again, but it didn’t yield any secrets, so he saved the tab anyway and popped another to Google Scape Ore Swamp. Half an hour ter, he found the edit war on the Wikipedia page about the Lizardman who lived there. The same person (Nick5256143) kept trying to add something to the page. The st time they’d done it was three days ago.

  Every time it was done, it was undone within 24 hours. “The Lizardman was kidnapped by unknown aliens in 1998,” the person kept trying to say, and when he checked the username on the video, it was the same.

  There were a surprising number of videos on Nick’s YouTube channel, and an equally surprising ck of subscribers, given the crystal-clear cell phone videos of Bigfoot he’d been posting—a he, a chubby middle-aged man with a scruffy beard and even scruffier, flyaway gray hair. Nick wasn’t getting many views, and at least 80% of his few comments called him a fraud. He didn’t defend himself, but he’d been posting since December 2005.

  Beri Googled again, the username in a new tab on the right-side monitor. When the results popped up, he turned back to the monitor in the center and clicked over to Nick’s Wikipedia page. His edit history was sporadic for several years, but recently at least every three or four days, he edited articles about cryptids. The Jersey Devil, the Lizardman, and El Chupacabra, he consistently cimed, had been kidnapped by “unknown aliens.”

  The man was clearly insane, but something about that blurry video and its acid green lighting was unnervingly familiar. This was the closest thing Beri had found to a lead. He clicked into one of the ‘comments’ fields and typed, I think these aliens stole my girlfriend.

  He stared at the stark bck writing against the white background, thankful no one could know who he was from his username. Maybe he had gone insane, just as everyone else seemed to think. Maybe the headache nagging behind his eyes wasn’t ck of sleep and too much caffeine. Maybe it was an early indicator he’d completely lost his shit.

  Beri snorted. Early. He’d spent the weekend in a mental hospital.

  He clicked ‘submit.’