The Watcher [Alien Nation #1]

Chapter 7

The words on the screen before her oozed through her brain like glue. Jules sighed when she reached for her mug of coffee only to find that it was stone cold-she wondered how long it had been since it had been drinkable. She rubbed her eyes, spots dancing behind her eyelids. Despite spending most of the day asleep, she still felt a tiredness that reached all the way to her bones.

Even after everything that had happened, the invasion, the council meeting, everything, there was still endless paperwork. At least it was something she could at least pretend was normal when everything else was falling apart.

She'd been keeping an eye on a woman called Emma Ng for about three months. Ng was one of the last people to be offered a place on the Hub before the Council had allowed the DoEA to focus solely on First Contact preparations. She had flatly refused the DoEA's offer. Jules had seen the recordings of her interview, and the woman seemed to believe she was hallucinating the whole thing. Everything on her social media and in the local Toronto news, and in all the searches Jules had managed to track in her browser, showed no indication that Ng had any inkling that anything had happened after the memory wipe. Still, you could never be too careful, though more than once in the past three hours Jules had caught herself wondering why it even mattered any more. It wasn't as though there were a lot of secrets left.

Some time later, a message alert popped up at the bottom of the screen, though it took a few moments for Jules to notice it, entranced as she was with Emma Ng's review of some science fiction film, just in case Ng had tried to encode any secret messages between her complaints about lens flares. It wasn't likely, but it had happened. Once.

She closed the page after she finally realised that there was nothing significant hidden within. Jules sighed and ran her hands through her dark hair, which she'd released from its bun to hang in a greasy curtain around her face. Washing her hair had been the last thing on her mind since she'd got back to the Hub, and she was starting to regret it.

"Let's see what they want now," she muttered when she saw the DoEA logo in the corner of the alert. It had only been a few hours since the disastrous Council meeting had ended-surely they wouldn't have made a decision about what to do already? She clicked the alert and it quickly enlarged to fill the page.

To: julia.trentinoDoEA@hubmail.gov

From: lara.bakkerDoEA@hubmail.gov

Subject: Urgent

Jules,

Come to meeting room 04 in the Spire at 1100. Will explain there.

Lara

PS You are not in trouble yet.

Yet. Three letters, yet it set off a spiral of thoughts in her head, many of them consisting of four letters. She felt sick. How much trouble was 'trouble'? Was it 'verbal warning', 'slap on the wrist' trouble? Or was it 'you'll never fly again' trouble?

How much did they know?

There was, as much as she hated to admit it, only one way to find out.

XxX

Meeting room 04 was right at the top of the Spire, in a narrow corridor branching off from the central passage that spiralled around the Council chamber. The Spire was silent at this time of night, at least at this level, and her footsteps echoed on the tiles like a ticking clock. Law enforcement, emergency services, flight control, and the Hub's other essential services would still be working lower down, but from here, Jules could fool herself into thinking she was the only one on the station.