The alien coverage had been running for six hours straight.

  Yuji knew this because the television in the school cafeteria had been on since breakfast and it was now well into lunch and the footage hadn't changed — the same thirty seconds of the diplomatic vessel hovering above the lunar station, silver and perfectly still, replaying on a loop while a rotating cast of commentators said variations of the same three things in different orders. Humanity was not alone. The universe was vast. Everything was going to be different now, or possibly the same, depending on who you asked.

  He ate his rice and didn't watch.

  "The one on the left," said Daichi, appearing from nowhere with a tray and the particular energy of someone who had been saving an opinion for the right audience. He dropped into the seat across from Yuji and pointed at the screen with his chopsticks. "The alien diplomat. I'm telling you, normal. If you just look at the face and not the — the other parts, completely normal."

  "The other parts being," Yuji said.

  "The eyes."

  "The eyes are part of the face."

  "You know what I mean."

  Yuji looked at the screen for the first time. The diplomatic footage had cut to a press conference — one of the early ones, from eight months ago, the first time the alien representatives had appeared in front of cameras. He'd seen it before. Everyone had seen it before. The representative in question was standing at a podium with the specific stillness of something that had decided to be very careful about how much it moved in front of cameras, which Yuji privately thought was wise. It had a face, in the general sense — bilateral symmetry, features in the expected locations. The eyes, as Daichi had noted, were not quite right. The color was wrong and the pupil structure was wrong and they caught the light in a way that eyes weren't supposed to catch light.

  "It's looking directly at the camera," Yuji said.

  "Right, but if you—"

  "The whole time. It hasn't blinked once in this entire clip."

  Daichi watched the footage. "Hm," he said.

  "Normal, you said."

  "Relatively normal. In context. Don't be literal." Daichi pointed his chopsticks at Yuji now instead of the screen, which was a gesture Yuji had learned meant he was about to say something he thought was important. "The thing is, they chose us. Out of everything in the universe. They came here. Doesn't that make you want to know why?"

  Yuji considered this. Outside the cafeteria windows it was raining — a light persistent autumn rain that had been going since morning and showed no signs of making a decision about itself. A few people were crossing the courtyard with umbrellas. A teacher was standing under the overhang looking at her phone.

  "Not really," he said.

  Daichi made a sound of profound disappointment. "You're always like this."

  "You always say that."

  "Because it's always true." Daichi turned back to his food, shaking his head with theatrical sadness. "Something historic is happening. Humanity made contact with an alien civilization. Everything is going to change. And you're eating rice."

  "The rice is good."

  "That's not the point."

  "It's a point," Yuji said. "It's my point."

  Daichi gave up and ate his lunch. On the television, the representative blinked exactly once, which Yuji suspected was deliberate.

  He walked home the long way.

  This was not a decision he made — it was just what his feet did when he left school, had been doing for two years without requiring input from the rest of him. Left out of the main gate, right at the convenience store, left again past the park with the broken fountain, and then the long block that ran parallel to Shirogane Street rather than down it. It added eight minutes to his commute. He had never once taken the short way home since the autumn two years ago, and he didn't think about it, and on the days when he was running late he still walked this way and just accepted being late as the cost of something he wasn't examining.

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  The rain picked up slightly. He put his hood up.

  His mother had texted to say she'd be home late — a meeting had run over, something to do with the documentation backlog from the first contact event. She worked in administrative coordination for the government's liaison office, which was not a prestigious or interesting job but which had gotten substantially busier over the past two years and paid correspondingly better. She never talked about the specifics. He'd never asked. They had a functional arrangement around not asking each other about things.

  He stopped at the convenience store on his actual street — not the one on the long route, the one three minutes from home — and stood in the doorway for a moment because the rain had made a decision after all and the decision was heavier. The store was warm and bright and smelled like coffee and the particular synthetic sweetness of packaged food. A university student was asleep at one of the counter seats. A salary man was examining onigiri with the focus of someone making a consequential choice.

  Yuji bought a melon bread he didn't especially want and ate it in the doorway watching the rain.

  His phone buzzed. Daichi, in the group chat, had sent a link to an article: FIRST CONTACT ANNIVERSARY — WHERE ARE WE NOW? followed by seventeen people's opinions about it, none of which Yuji read. He put his phone back in his pocket.

  The thing about Daichi's question — doesn't that make you want to know why — was that Yuji did know why. Or he knew part of it, more than Daichi knew he knew, which was its own kind of thing to carry around. His mother's job had certain adjacencies. Documents came home sometimes in the wrong bag, or conversations happened in the next room with the door not quite closed, or you were good at noticing things and you spent two years noticing things because noticing things gave you something to do that wasn't anything else.

  He knew that the alien civilization — the Aethon, they were called, though the word was a translation approximation and the representatives had been gently clear that the actual name was not something human vocal architecture could reproduce — had not arrived at Earth randomly. He knew that whatever their reason was, it was not the one being given in press conferences. He knew that they had asked, very specifically and very early in the diplomatic process, about anomalous flux events in the Solar system over the past decade.

  He knew what flux was. He'd looked it up after the third time he heard it in a partially overheard conversation. An energy — naturally occurring, permeating all of space, the underlying mechanism of both their technology and certain things that didn't have a better name yet. He knew that the Aethon had detected something in the Sol system that interested them. He knew that the timestamp on that anomaly, according to a document that had spent twenty minutes on the kitchen table before his mother put it away, was approximately two years ago.

  He finished the melon bread. It was fine. Melon bread was always fine — it promised more than it delivered, which was a quality he found consistent and therefore reliable.

  The rain eased. He walked the three minutes home.

  Their apartment was quiet in the way apartments were quiet when only one person lived in them with any consistency. His mother's presence was there in the organized kitchen and the good lamp in the living room and the plants on the windowsill that she watered every Sunday, but she wasn't home yet and the space knew it. Yuji dropped his bag by the door, took off his shoes, and went to the kitchen to figure out dinner.

  There was rice in the cooker from this morning. Eggs in the fridge. He could do something with that.

  He was cracking the second egg when he noticed the photograph.

  It had been on the refrigerator for two years — he walked past it every day, had walked past it this morning, would walk past it tomorrow. A family photo, the kind taken at a specific occasion he could reconstruct if he tried: New Year's, the year before last, his grandmother's house. His mother on the left, younger-looking than she was now in the way people looked younger before certain things happened. Him on the right, fifteen and visibly uncomfortable with being photographed, which had not changed.

  In the middle, his sister.

  She was making a face at the camera — not a bad face, just the particular expression of someone who found having their photograph taken mildly beneath them but was tolerating it for the sake of the occasion. She was sixteen in this photo.

  He looked at the photograph for a moment. Then he went back to the eggs.

  He had made his peace with it. This was what he told himself and what he told the school counselor he'd seen four times in the immediate aftermath and what he communicated to Daichi through the medium of being functional and present and willing to eat lunch and talk about aliens on the television. He had made his peace with the not knowing — with the case that had gone cold, the investigation that had produced nothing, the version of events that was she walked to school and didn't arrive and stopped there because there was nothing after it.

  He had made his peace with it in the same way the rain had made a decision earlier: imperfectly, with periodic reversals, in a way that mostly held up until it didn't.

  The eggs were done. He ate dinner standing at the counter, which his mother would have had opinions about if she were home. The photograph was behind him. He didn't look at it again.

  His phone buzzed. Daichi again: okay but the eyes thing is kind of growing on me.

  Yuji sent back a thumbs up and finished his rice.

  Outside, the rain had stopped entirely, the way it sometimes did — all at once, without transition, like a decision finally made. The city noise settled into its nighttime register. Somewhere a few floors up someone was watching the news, and he could hear the familiar thirty-second loop of footage, the diplomatic vessel hovering above the lunar station, silver and perfectly still.

  He washed his bowl. Turned off the kitchen light.

  Didn't look at the photograph.