The Watcher [Alien Nation #1]

Prologue

Josh's breathing came in ragged huffs as he hauled his equipment to the mouth of the cave, carefully stacking his light, camera, and audio recorder on a sheet of canvas behind a rock, safe from the wet sand and the spray from the sea.

When he was done, he stopped to catch his breath, hands resting on his hips. When he'd finished filming...it, he'd have to remember to get a panorama. The restless sea and grim overcast sky would be a fantastic opener, framed as they were by the towering cliffs on both sides. He'd been lucky that this tip-off had directed him to an islet a few miles off the Scottish Highlands, where he was unlikely to be disturbed and he could shoot some more landscapes. He was getting sick of having to recycle the same footage, so his audience were probably getting bored too.

As he strapped his body cam to his chest, Josh's mind skimmed over all the possible angles he could take, all the ways he could spin this. The anonymous tip-off he'd received a few months ago had described a wreckage, like nothing they had ever seen before-not of Earth, even. They'd sent some photos, but they were amateur, dimly lit and too grainy to make out anything useful beyond an indistinctly metallic shape. At most, he expected some smuggler's attempt to hide the evidence. Was smuggling still a thing? Maybe. Maybe the local police would pay for that kind of information. If not, surely someone would pay for the scrap metal.

Scrap or not, the guy who'd sent the tip had seemed pretty convinced. As long as he played this right, he could convince his audience, too. Maybe a few casual viewers, as well. It wouldn't hurt to bump up his viewer count a bit-more clicks meant more ad money, after all.

Taking a deep breath, Josh switched on his headlamp and camera, and the recording began.

He took a step into the cave. He liked to stay silent when filming, and add a voice-over later. For the moment, the only sounds were his trainers crunching over the waterlogged sand and the steady drip of water in the depths.

He held his arms out for balance as he picked his way further inside. The sand gave way to solid stone, and his feet slid on the slippery rocks. His torchlight flickered on the gleaming wet stone, until it caught something smooth and metallic.

At first it looked like the hull of a small boat turned on its side, but the shape was wrong-the bottom was flat, with some sort of leg thing jutting out of it. At the bow and stern there was a group of what looked like...thrusters?

The fuck?

Josh suddenly felt very cold, and it wasn't the sea breeze. He picked up a pebble and tossed it at the hull. It dropped straight to the floor with a solid clunk, but there was no other movement inside the cave-no alarms or emergency lights, anyway.

He inched forward.

The structure lay up against the cave wall-Josh knew he should worry about the cavern collapsing on him, but at that point it was the last thing on his mind. Parts of the hull-it wasn't metal, now that he could look closer at it, but something almost like it-were warped and blackened. Josh swiped over it with his fingers, half expecting the structure to buzz to life beneath his touch like in some shitty sci-fi movie, but it remained still, cold and dead.

He crouched down to get a better shot of the damage, but when he glanced back at the mouth of the cave for a second, his light glanced off something long and white. He cringed away instantly, cursing as if stung.

A bone. He'd seen a bone.

Josh stared at it, wide-eyed in horror. Not just a bone, a skeleton. He inched closer, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing.

The part closest to him was an ankle sticking out of a shoe-or at least what was probably a shoe, because whatever these bones had belonged to had certainly not been human, if the tail was any indication.

The...creature had died on its side, one three-fingered hand outstretched towards the wreckage. He'd never seen anything like this skeleton, maybe except in a museum dinosaur exhibit. But it couldn't be a dinosaur, that was stupid.

More stupid than being an alien? he wondered. Josh took another look at the skeleton. Perhaps not. The alien-if that was what it was-lay curled on its side, face turned to the ground so he could only see the back of its skull. The one leg he could see was an odd shape, though, the knee bending backwards and the leg structured as if the alien had always walked on their toes like a cat. Scraps of clothing clung to the bones, faded and weather-worn. They might have been blue, once.

Josh fought back a sudden wave of nausea and turned his torch towards what looked like the back end of the wreck, the end that faced the cave mouth. He screwed his eyes shut, trying to banish the mental image of the corpse-or, at least, very convincing fake corpse-from his mind. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling, and he was caught between capturing as much of the scene as he could on camera, and running out of the cave and calling the fishermen who had brought him to the islet to pick him up early so he could get the hell out.

But then he might not have enough footage, and he'd lose views. He'd lose ad money.

Josh opened his eyes and kept the camera rolling.

He hadn't noticed before, but there was a small indent in the cave wall just at the edge of the crumpled wreck. He aimed his torch at it, and he could see a hunched-over shape, but the torch wasn't bright enough to show anything else.

He crept forward, the patch of light shaking where he had the torch in a death-grip. He froze a few feet away from the cranny. There was another skeleton slumped against the wall. It was smaller than the first alien-more his size. And his shape, slimmer than the first, with a narrower chest, and legs like his. Everything was like him-ten fingers, a full set of teeth, the head tilted towards the cave mouth as if gazing outside in longing. Rags the same as the first skeleton's hung from its ribs.

There could be no mistaking it.

This skeleton was human.