The oil was thick and black and it got under my fingernails where I couldn't scrub it out. Same as the memory. Three years I've been working at this garage in Youngstown, Ohio, and the memory still gets under my fingernails.

Sean was watching me change the oil on a Ford pickup. Nineteen years old, eyes bright, hands clean because he'd never worked a real job before. He wanted to be an astronaut. NASA had just accepted his application. He came to say goodbye today.

"Ez," he said. "You gonna come? To the launch?"

I didn't look up from the drain pan. "I'm not going."

"You saw those things, right? On Montel? Real aliens."

I kept my hands on the drain pan. The oil was still warm. "Put the cap back on, Sean."

He did. He always did what I told him to. That was the problem.

Linda left a year after I got back. One suitcase and the golden retriever. No argument. No drama. Just gone one morning with a note on the kitchen table that said: *I can't do this.* She didn't say what "this" was. She didn't have to.

The doctor gave me pills. Blue ones. One a night. They don't help. I still hear the footsteps every night. Not real footsteps—PTSD, the doctor calls it. I don't disagree.

I remember Montel clearly. Too clearly. Like a film reel burned into my retina. The purple sky. The metal camp. The way the thing's hoof came down beside us, close enough that the ground shook and the walls groaned.

We didn't escape heroically. Nobody does. The escape was ugly. The crew turned on each other—real fast, no hesitation. Tommy tried to lock Danny in the cargo bay to save weight. Danny found out and nearly broke Tommy's face with a wrench. Captain Moran yelled at everybody and blamed everybody and then blamed himself for exactly five minutes before blaming somebody else again.

I fired the laser. My hand was shaking. I'd been drinking since morning—always have when I'm scared, always have my whole life—and I missed the creature entirely. Scorched the side of the *Aurora*. Nearly burned the engine that Billy had spent a week trying to fix. Billy had stolen parts from that engine to sell on the black market. Now he was trying to put them back while the world ended around him.

Martha died in the med bay. Nobody noticed. She had cancer. She'd been hiding it. We were all too busy being afraid to notice one of our own dying.

We got seven people killed. Not in battle. Not heroically. Frank was crushed by debris. Mary was caught in the shockwave. Two technicians died of heart attacks. Pure terror. The kind that stops a heart from the inside.

I got back to Earth. I wrote a report. Thirty pages. Photographs. Measurements. Records of a world where mountains breathe and the sky is full of ancient things that eat each other. The company executives read it, laughed, and threw it in the trash. "Nobody wants to hear this, Ezra," the regional manager said. "Just buy the mining rights to Montel and shut up."

So I shut up. I change oil in Youngstown. I hear footsteps every night.

Sean asked me if I'd seen real aliens. I told him to put the cap back on the oil pan. He did. He always does what I tell him to.

That's the thing about trauma. It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you wise. It just makes you good at one thing: surviving. Changing oil. Swallowing the memory. Going to work the next day.

The oil was thick and black. I got it under my fingernails. I couldn't scrub it out. Same as the memory.