Kiera's Moon

Chapter One

“I’m not interested,” Kiera said. “Men are heartache and more trouble than they’re worth. Either they’re huge babies you have to take care of, or they want to lock you in their palace with eunuchs.”

“Well, you could at least meet them. He has seven brothers. Maybe one of them will fall somewhere in the middle of your man-scale.”

“Omigod. No!”

“What do you think?” Evelyn prodded again.

“I’m not going on blind dates or being hooked up with hairy alpha males.”

“No, about the aliens.”

“What aliens?” Kiera asked.

“You know, the ones out there.” Evelyn tossed a hand toward the dark night sky again.

“I don’t know,” Kiera answered. “I imagine if there are aliens, they’ve been discreet for a reason. I don’t see any reason to change that.”

“You don’t want to see other worlds?”

“Other worlds?” she echoed. “I want to explore mine first! I’ve never been to Europe, or Africa, or anywhere yet. I paint what I think they look like, but I want to see them. I like the sun and sky and ocean—what is there to say other worlds have those?”

“I guess.” Evelyn sounded unusually pensive. “But if it were a world like ours, I imagine it would be okay, right?”

“You mean a kind of other dimension thing, where it’s really earth just in a different way?”

“No, a different world completely, but similar in that it has a sun, moon, oceans, grass, and stuff.”

“Oh,” Kiera murmured. The conversation was almost too serious for her muddled thoughts to follow. She sensed Evelyn’s sudden melancholy and tried to focus. “You want to go to another world? Like, with aliens and stuff?”

“It would be neat, don’t you think? Hypothetically speaking …”

“Could you come home when you wanted?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Could you take your cat?”

“Probably not,” Evelyn replied.

“Would there be lots of people there with four arms or something freakish?”

Evelyn giggled, then said, “No.”

“There’d have to be some sort of difference, wouldn’t there?” Kiera’s brow furrowed. “If no two people are alike on our planet, how could we be like anything from somewhere else?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn admitted.

“I bet they’d be ruled by spiders the size of your car,” Kiera said with a shudder. “Could you imagine?”

“They don’t have spiders,” Evelyn said firmly. “And the people are pretty normal. I imagine I’d want to know if I could come home to visit you.”

“Yes, that’d be cool. I’ll take care of your house while you’re gone,” Kiera offered. Drowsiness was beginning to take hold of her. She closed her eyes, content.

“And the cat,” Evelyn added.

“Okay.”

“But wouldn’t you want to go, too?”

“I’m not sure,” Kiera murmured, hovering at the edge of sleep.

“Would you be afraid?”