I.

The man who hired me had eyes like cracked marbles and hands that wouldn't stop moving. He sat in my office with a hat on his lap and a cigarette that went out three times before he noticed. His name was Dr. Arthur Voss, and he was a scientist, which in my experience meant either he knew more than he should or less than he claimed. With guys like Voss, you could never tell which.

"I need you to follow someone," he said. His voice had the tremor of a man who has not slept in days and is trying to hide it with money.

"Everyone needs someone to follow them. That's what the cops are for."

"The cops can't help me. This is... this is above their pay grade."

That was the second time he'd used that phrase. I'd heard it once before, from a guy who turned out to be running from his wife's brother with a baseball bat. I took the case anyway. The money was good, and I was bored, and boredom in my line of work is more dangerous than any enemy.

II.

Voss lived in a walk-up on Sunset with blackout curtains and a phone that rang exactly once during the three days I followed him. Once. At 2 AM. He answered it in a whisper and said, "Yes. Yes, I understand. No, I haven't spoken to anyone. No, the data is secure." Then he hung up and sat on the edge of his bed for an hour, staring at the wall.

I watched him go to work every day—Palomar Observatory, or what was left of it. He spent eight hours a night looking at data on a computer screen, and when he came home, he locked his door and checked the windows.

On the third night, I decided to stop following and start talking. I showed up at his apartment unannounced at 11 PM, which is considered rude in most social contexts but standard procedure when you're trying to figure out if a man is lying to you about extraterrestrial signals.

He opened the door wearing a robe and looking like a man who had forgotten how to take care of himself. Which, apparently, he had.

"Mr. Mercer," he said. "You're not supposed to be here."

"I'm supposed to be following you. There's a difference."

He stepped back and let me in. The apartment smelled of old coffee and old fear. On the desk was a stack of papers covered in equations, a photograph of a woman who looked nothing like Voss, and a printed output from a computer that contained a sequence of numbers that made no sense to me and all the sense in the world.

"Can you read this?" he asked.

I could not read it. But I could read people, and Voss was reading like a man who had found something that would change everything if anyone would let him change it.

"This is a signal," he said. "From outside the solar system. From outside the galaxy. It's... it's a list. A list of civilizations, and their status, and—"

"And you're telling me this to me because why? Because you want a detective to validate your conspiracy theories?"

"Because I know who you are, Mercer. You were Navy intelligence. You served in the Pacific. You know what it means to face an enemy you can't see, can't reach, can't understand. This is that enemy. And it's already here."

III.

The lady in red started appearing a week after I took the case. She was tall, with dark hair and eyes that looked at me the way predators look at prey—not with hunger, but with recognition. She wore red every time, and she always stood across the street from Voss's apartment, watching.

"Who is she?" I asked Voss.

He went pale. "Don't engage with her."

"Engage or don't engage? That's not an answer."

"It's all the answer you're going to get."

I engaged anyway. I followed the lady in red through the streets of Los Angeles—at jazz clubs on Wrigleyville, at diners on Alameda, at a bar beneath the Hollywood sign where the owner knew everyone and nobody knew anyone. She never spoke to me. She never acknowledged me. She just watched Voss, and I watched her watching him.

And then I found out she wasn't the only one watching him.

The Feds showed up on a Tuesday. Not the local cops—the real Feds, in suits that cost more than my car and smiles that cost less. They sat in my office and asked me very polite questions about what I had found and who I had talked to and whether I understood that national security was a serious matter.

"You're not FBI," I said.

"No, sir. We're something else."

Something else. That's the thing you say when you're something you don't want to name.

IV.

The truth, when I found it, was worse than anything I had imagined. It was not a person watching Voss. It was not a government agency or a foreign power or a cult of star worshippers.

It was everyone.

Every institution in this city—government, military, scientific, corporate—knew about the signal. They had known for years. They had been monitoring it, studying it, containing it. And the containment strategy was simple: silence. No one was allowed to acknowledge it. No one was allowed to publish. No one was allowed to warn anyone.

Voss was the first person in decades who had managed to receive the signal without the system catching him. And now the system was trying to decide what to do with him.

"Kill him?" I asked the man in the suit. I did not mean it as a question.

"Protect the public," he said. "Some knowledge is too dangerous to be freely distributed."

I looked at him. I looked at the suit. I thought about Voss in his walk-up with the blackout curtains and the dead cigarette. I thought about the lady in red, who was probably not a spy but something worse: someone who knew the truth and was trying to protect the man who carried it.

I quit the case the next morning. Voss never called. The lady in red stopped appearing. The Feds kept watching.

I sat in my office and listened to the rain hit the window and tried to forget what I had learned. But some knowledge is a curse, and curses don't end just because you quit the case.

The galaxy is a dark place. The hunters are real. And the men in suits know it, and the scientists know it, and the lady in red knows it, and I know it.

And that makes me just another carrier. Just another voice in the dark, trying to warn people who don't want to hear it.