Haunted by the mystery of a strange accident, the life of Asteria, a young writer, suddenly takes a turn when aliens arrive on Earth and she is among the group selected to participate in the first contact, and the first interplanetary peace treaty...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I blinked in surprise and checked the notifications. It was then that I realized I had at least 10 missed calls, not counting several texts that just said "CALL ME."
How strange, I thought. Sam was almost never this pushy...
At the moment I was about to dial him to find out what was happening, I froze with the cell phone in my hands.
In an almost cloudless sky, immersed in a gloom that was slightly beginning to clear; there in the middle of stars that little by little were fading in the incipient luminosity, there was an object that I had never seen. It wasn't anything known like a plane, or a helicopter, and it didn't make any sound that at the distance I was I could perceive.
- What's that? – I murmured, as I walked towards the small balcony outside my room.
Wasting no time, I moved my mother's old telescope from inside my room to the balcony, pointed it at the object, and then watched in amazement.
Neither comet nor meteorite. The object was an oval with vertical lines and a strange luminescence, which passed through the air, traveling northwest at a constant speed.
Could it have been some kind of new military technology? I didn't know for sure. But I had a hunch of what that object might be.
Even without completely believing in what I was witnessing, I remained silent watching the figure cross the sky, and after a few seconds, the tone of my cell phone broke the silence again.
-Sam - I answered without even looking at the screen.
- Are you watching it? - he inquired.
-I...I can't believe it- I responded, now looking at the object without a telescope in between.
-Well, that's the least surprising thing I had to say to you.
- W...? What do you mean, Sam?
- You have to come to my apartment, Aster - he said in an enigmatic and urgent voice. – And bring your investigation of the case.
My eyes quickly traveled to the orange folder that was almost hidden under the drafts of a bunch of ideas for my books. Immediately afterwards I took the photos and clippings of my mural together with the card with the symbol, and after hastily putting everything in the folder and successively in my backpack, I put on a jacket.
I ran down the steps, and after fumbling to put on some sneakers, I took out my bicycle.
With the sun a while away from rising, and the object heading towards the horizon, I rode the 10 minute bike it took me to get from my house to Sam's apartment.
I went up the elevator still catching my breath. And when the boy finally opened the door to his apartment, his brown eyes, even darker than mine, looked at me with a hint of concern, just before motioning for me to come inside.
