Transmission

She stared at him, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. “No, you can’t be, that’s…”

She hugged him then, tight enough that Kevin could barely breathe.

“Tell me it’s a joke. Tell me it’s not real.”

“I wish it weren’t,” Kevin said. He wished that more than anything right then.

Luna pulled back, and Kevin could see her screwing her features tight with the effort of not crying. Normally, Luna was good at not crying about things. Now, though, he could see it taking everything she had.

“This… how long?” she asked.

“They said maybe six months,” Kevin said.

“And that was days ago, so it’s less now,” Luna shot back. “And you’ve been having to cope with it on your own, and…” She faded into silence as the sheer enormity of it obviously hit her.

Kevin could see her looking out at the people on the reservoir, watching them with their small boats and their quick forays into the water. They seemed so happy there. She stared at them as if they were the part she couldn’t believe, not the illness.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “All these people, just going on as if the world is the same, going about having fun when you’re dying.”

Kevin smiled sadly. “What are we supposed to do? Tell them all to stop having fun?”

He realized the danger in saying that slightly too late as Luna leapt to her feet, cupped her hands to her mouth, and yelled at the top of her voice.

“Hey, all of you, you have to stop! My friend is dying, and I demand that you stop having fun at once!”

A couple of people looked around, but no one stopped. Kevin suspected that hadn’t been the point. Luna stood there for several seconds, and this time, he was the one to hug her, holding her while she cried. That was enough of a rarity that the sheer shock value of it held Kevin there. Luna shouting at people, behaving in ways that they would never expect from someone like her, was normal. Luna breaking down wasn’t.

“Feel better?” he asked after a while.

She shook her head. “Not really. What about you?”

“Well, it’s nice to know that there’s someone who would try to stop the world for me,” he said. “You know the worst part?”

Luna managed another smile. “Not being able to spell what’s killing you?”

Kevin could only return that smile. Trust Luna to know that he needed her to be her usual self, making fun of him.

“I can, I practiced. The worst part is that all this means no one believes me when I tell them that I’ve been seeing things. They think it’s all just the illness.”

Luna cocked her head to one side. “What kind of things?”

Kevin explained to her about the strange landscapes he’d been seeing, the fire wiping it clean, the sensation of a countdown.

“That…” Luna began when he was finished. She didn’t seem to know how to end though.

“I know, it’s crazy, I’m crazy,” Kevin said. Even Luna didn’t believe him.

“You didn’t let me finish,” Luna said, drawing in a breath. “That… is so cool.”

“Cool?” Kevin repeated. It hadn’t been the response he expected, even from her. “Everyone else thinks I’m going crazy, or my brain is melting, or something.”

“Everyone else is stupid,” Luna declared, although, to be fair, that seemed to be her default setting for life. To her, everyone was stupid until proven otherwise.

“So you believe me?” Kevin said. Even he wasn’t completely sure anymore, after everything people had said to him.

Luna held onto his shoulders, looking him squarely in the eyes. With another girl, Kevin might have thought she was about to kiss him. Not with Luna, though.

“If you tell me that these visions are real, then they’re real. I believe you. And being able to see alien worlds is definitely cool.”

Kevin’s eyes widened a little at that. “What makes you think that it’s an alien world?”

Luna stepped back with a shrug. “What else is it going to be?”

When she asked that, Kevin got the feeling that she was every bit as stunned by all this as he was. She just did a better job of hiding it.

“Maybe…” she guessed, “…maybe all this has changed your brain, so that it has a direct line to this alien place?”

If Luna ever acquired a superpower, it would probably be the ability to leap tall conclusions in a single bound. Kevin liked that about her, especially when it meant that she was the one person who might believe him, but even so, it felt like a lot to decide, so quickly.

“You know how crazy that sounds, right?” he said.

“No crazier than the idea that the world is just going to snatch my friend away for no good reason,” Luna shot back, her fists clenched in a way that suggested she would happily fight it over the issue. Or maybe just clenched with the effort of not crying again. Luna tended to get angry, or make jokes, or do crazy things rather than be upset. Right then, Kevin couldn’t blame her.

He watched her coming down from whatever nearly crying space she was in, winding down from it piece by piece and forcing a smile into the space instead.

“So, terrible disease, cool visions of alien worlds… is there anything else you aren’t telling me?”

“Just the numbers,” Kevin said.

Luna looked at him with obvious annoyance. “You get that you weren’t supposed to say yes there?”

“I wanted to tell you everything,” Kevin said, although he guessed it was probably a bit late now. “Sorry.”

“Okay,” Luna said. Again, Kevin had the sense of her working to process it all. “Numbers?”

“I see them too,” Kevin said. He repeated them from memory. “23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59.”

“Okay,” Luna said. She pursed her lips. “I wonder what they mean.”

That they might not mean anything seemed not to occur to her. Kevin loved that about her.

She had her phone out. “It’s not right for a license plate, and it would be weird for a password. What else?”

Kevin hadn’t thought about it, at least not with the kind of directness that Luna seemed to be applying to the problem.

“Maybe like an item number, a serial number?” Kevin suggested.

“But there are hours and minutes there,” Luna said. She seemed utterly caught up in the problem of what it might mean. “What else?”