Needle & Groove

The van was exactly where Tyler said it would be, back behind the shop in a gravel lot full of old paint cans. Mari saw it first and stopped walking.

"That's it?"

"That's it," Alicia said.

It was a VW bus, cream colored, rust creeping up over the wheel wells like something slow and patient. There was a dent in the passenger door shaped kind of like a thumbprint. Mari had been picturing something newer. Something that wouldn't rattle itself apart somewhere around Kansas.

"You said vintage," Mari said. "You did not say vintage like this."

"It runs good." Alicia knocked twice on the side of it, like she was greeting an old dog. "Tyler keeps it up."

The shop door banged open before Mari could argue. Tyler came out wiping his hands on an apron that had once been white and hadn't been for years. He was twenty-nine, built like someone who carried book pallets for a living, which he was.

"Well, look at that face." He pointed at Mari with a folded-up packing list. "That's the face of a woman who just saw her ride for the next two thousand miles."

"It's a great van, Tyler," Mari said.

"You didn't say that with your whole chest."

"It's a great van."

"Better." He handed her the packing list. "Oil's fresh, spare's under the floor mat, there's a tool roll behind the driver's seat. If it makes a noise you don't recognize, it's supposed to make that noise."

"Which noises are not supposed to happen?"

"Grinding. If you hear grinding, call me." He grinned. "Otherwise you're fine. You two are gonna be fine."

Mari had known Tyler since she started dating Alicia, two years back. Tyler had been her first friend here. He still thought Alicia was from somewhere normal, like Ohio. Mari knew better, but only sort of. More on that later, or so Alicia kept promising.

Inside the shop smelled like it always did, leather and hot glue and old paper. It was the good kind of dusty. Tyler's father had run the place before him and there were brass tools on the walls nobody living knew how to use. Tables ran down the middle with big books laid open, pressed flat under weights. Mari loved this room. She'd done a piece on the shop for the county paper her second year at the job and Tyler had never let her live down the part where she called it "an oasis of craft."

"An oasis of craft," he said now, pointing at her. "Quote of the decade."

"You're welcome."

"Got the paperwork inside if you want to sign for the insurance thing. Give me five minutes, I got a binding in the press that's about ready." He disappeared toward the back, all business, leaving them alone in the middle of the room.

Mari ran a finger along the spine of a ledger that looked older than the state. "So this thing runs the whole way?"

"It ran to Tulsa last spring."

"Tulsa. Four hours."

"Six, the way you drive."

"Hey!"

Alicia laughed and then went quiet in a way Mari had learned to read by now. Two years of dating taught you a person's silences. This one had weight in it. Alicia walked to the corner of the shop where Tyler kept a record player on a wooden crate, next to a milk crate of vinyl that had been sorted by nobody, ever.

"Alicia?"

"Before we go," Alicia said. "There's something I want to show you. And it's not a packing list."

She flipped through the crate without really looking at it. Then she pulled out a record that had no sleeve. No label either. Just blank black vinyl, like somebody had pressed a song and forgotten to put anything on the outside.

"What is that?" Mari said. "Where'd that come from?"

"Tyler doesn't know it's in there. Or he does and forgot. It blends in." Alicia set it on the turntable with both hands, careful, like it was made of eggshell. "I've been trying to find the right day to do this for about a year. And the van's here, and we leave tomorrow, and I figured..."

She trailed off. She cranked the volume knob down low so it was barely a whisper, and dropped the needle.

Mari expected something old and scratchy. What came out was nothing like anything she'd heard. It wasn't music exactly, or it was music the way a river is water. There were tones underneath the tones, going different directions at once, and one low note that didn't come from the speaker so much as from the floor of the shop, up through Mari's boots. It made the hair on her arms stand up and it was not unpleasant. It was like hearing a voice from a country you'd never known existed and realizing you'd been homesick for it your whole life.

"What the hell," Mari whispered. "What is that?"

"Listen to it a second," Alicia said. "Then I'll tell you."

The song went somewhere. It rose and folded over on itself. There was a part near the middle that Mari could only describe as two voices agreeing on something sad. Then it wound down, quiet as it started, and the needle ticked in the runout groove.

Alicia lifted it off with both hands and slid it back in the crate.

"Okay," Mari said. Her voice came out weird. "Okay, so. Explain, please!"

"I will. I need you to not freak out first."

"I'm not freaking out. I'm standing very still, which is different."

"Fair." Alicia took a breath. She did that when she was nervous, Mari had noticed. Never any other time. "Mari. I'm not from Ohio."

"No kidding!"

"I'm not from here. Any of it. I've been on this planet five years. I landed about forty miles east of where the fair is, in a field, at night, and I walked into town the next morning and Tyler gave me a ride because my story was garbage and he was too kind to say so."

Mari looked at her. Alicia looked back. Twenty-six years old, or she said she was, and she'd never once lied to Mari about anything Mari had thought to ask about. The trouble was nobody thinks to ask the big ones.

"Say it plain," Mari said. "I write for a paper. Say it like a lede."

"I'm from another world. Another star, another everything. I came here in a pod that broke up on the way down and most of it burned but one piece didn't. It's buried at the fairgrounds. Under the livestock pavilion, there's an old foundation slab, and it's under that. And I need to go get it and destroy it before somebody with a metal detector and a free Saturday finds it."

The record player ticked. Somewhere in back, Tyler's press thumped once.

Mari sat down on a stool by the worktable. Not because her legs gave out. Because sitting felt appropriate for a sentence like that.

"You're serious," she said.

"I'm serious."

"You've been serious for two years and five years and you're serious right now."

"Yeah."

"Huh." Mari rubbed her face with both hands. She wasn't scared. She kept checking herself for scared and it wasn't there, which surprised her more than the actual news did. What she felt was more like the moment in a story where a fact you'd half suspected gets printed and confirmed. She'd had that feeling at work. Rarely. "The song. That was..."

"From home. It's a work song, kind of. People sang it moving cargo, a long time ago. It sounds different here because the machines we used to press it onto things, the machines back home don't work the same way. Some of it doesn't come through."

"Some of it was coming up through the floor."

"That part's the real song."

Mari nodded slowly. Then she said, "Show me. You said there was more."

Alicia hesitated and then started unbuttoning her flannel. "Okay. But stand close, it's faint."

Mari got up and came around the table. Under the flannel Alicia wore a white undershirt and across her shoulders and down both arms there were lines. Mari had always assumed they were tattoos, some artsy constellation thing, the kind of thing flight instructors did. Up close they weren't ink. They sat under the skin somehow, pale silver, like scars from a very careful knife. And they weren't random. They were stars, connected. Charts. They ran from her left shoulder blade around to her collarbone and down to her wrist, and Mari was fairly sure they kept going.

"That's not ink," Mari said.

"No."

"You mapped the sky on yourself."

"It's a record too. Same idea as the record. Press what matters onto something that lasts." Alicia held her arm out and turned it slow so Mari could follow the lines. "This one here, that's home. Those three are the route. The rest is... people. Named after stars, I guess you'd say. Named for people."

Mari touched one of the lines with one fingertip. It was warm. Regular skin temperature, but somehow she'd expected cold.

"Does it hurt?"

"Never."

"Okay." Mari stepped back and blew out a breath. "Okay. So. Tuesday we leave. You drive us to a county fair in the Ozarks, we dig up a piece of your spaceship from under a pig barn..."

"Foundation slab."

"...dig it up, destroy it, and then what? Then we drive to the new city like we planned, I start at the paper there, and that's just life now? You're just, what, staying? For good?"

"That's the part I want to talk about," Alicia said. "That's the part I've been trying to say for a year and keep chickening out of."

"Well, we got a van and a whole drive," Mari said. "Start talking."

Before Alicia could, Tyler's press thumped again and his voice came floating from the back. "You two finding everything okay back there?"

"Yep," Alicia called, fast, and Mari bit down on a laugh, because of course that was the voice of a woman with a star chart on her arm hiding in a book shop.

Alicia got her flannel back on and sat down across from Mari at the worktable, elbows on the wood. Mari kept staring at her hands and turning things over.

"Wait. Wait a minute." She looked up. "The driving thing."

"What about the driving thing?"

Mari counted on her fingers. "Two years. Every road trip, every drive to Springfield, every airport run. You always drive. Always. First time I asked you said your knees. Second time you said you get carsick in the passenger seat, which, by the way, is not a real thing."

"It's a little bit of a real thing."

"And the navigation. Alicia, I watched you find the fairgrounds in Hardy County from a gas station receipt. No phone. You drove there like you'd done it a hundred times."

"Satellite view is not hard, Mari."

"You don't use satellite view. You don't even carry a phone charger. You always know which way north is. Always. Even in the car wash, even underground at the parking deck downtown. I thought, wow, she's got a great sense of direction. Some people are just like that."

Alicia's face did something complicated. "Okay," she said. "Yeah."

"Yeah. So that's been you. Flying a straight line the whole time, just, you know. Low." Mari leaned back on the stool. "How long of a flight was it? Original flight."

"A while. I don't love measuring it in years."

"Right. Because years are an Earth thing."

"Pretty much, yeah."

Tyler's press thumped again, and both of them flinched like guilty teenagers. Except no, Mari corrected herself, both of them were grown women, one of them was an alien, and neither of them needed to feel like this in a book shop. "We should go," she said. "Let the man work. And I need air."

They said their goodbyes to Tyler at the door. He had a pallet on his shoulder and sawdust on his flannel. "You two take care of that van," he said. "She leaks a little oil. Check under her before you go."

"Will do," Alicia said.

"Fair's a good time. Fried pickles at the gate stand." He looked between them. "You two okay? You've got a look."

"We're fine," Mari said, and it was even mostly true.

The gravel lot was bright and hot. The van sat there, cream paint gone yellow at the edges, rust creeping up from the wheel wells, that dent in the passenger door shaped like a thumbprint. Mari walked around to the passenger side and stopped. Looked at the seat. Looked at Alicia.

"I can drive," Alicia said. "If you want."

"You know what, yeah. Actually, yeah. You drive. It's kind of your whole thing