Asteroid | City

"Because," she said, "that's what we're all doing here, isn't it? Looking for something we lost." At midnight, the town's power failed. The military generators hummed, but the streetlights died. In the darkness, the children escaped the diner through a loose floorboard. Led by Woodrow and Andromeda, they crept to the crater's edge. The cube was still there, pulsing faintly in the dust.

"Or a pupil," Midge said. "An eye looking up at what hit it."

Andromeda did not put her sunglasses back on. She looked at the sky. It looked back, calm and empty and full of everything she had just learned to see. Asteroid City

Stanley was a celebrated actor in another life—or perhaps in this very life, it was hard to tell. He had a habit of stepping out of the frame of a conversation, as if searching for his mark. He stood now at the rim of the crater, a man in a rumpled seersucker suit, and stared down into the geological punchbowl. The impact, millions of years ago, had fused the sandstone into a glassy, malformed obsidian that reflected the sky in distorted, funhouse fragments.

The power came back on. The military men ran in circles. The sky remained stubbornly blue. The next morning, the quarantine was lifted. There was no mention of the event in any newspaper. The men in black suits took the cube and left a check for the town—a sum large enough to pave the roads and install streetlights and build a new wing on the diner. The Stargazer children were given certificates of participation. Woodrow did not win Junior Stargazer of the Year. The title went to a girl from Nebraska who had built a solar-powered marshmallow roaster. "Because," she said, "that's what we're all doing

That was the strangest part. The creature stood there, and the children stared, and the adults stared, and the town’s lone sheriff, a man named Hank who had not drawn his gun in fourteen years, simply put his coffee cup down very slowly and said, "Well, I’ll be."

It was not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane. It was as if someone had run a finger over a film projector’s lens, smearing the light. A high-pitched whine, like a tuning fork struck against a tombstone, vibrated through the ground. The children looked up. The adults looked up. The lizard with the blue tail stopped mid-dash. In the darkness, the children escaped the diner

"It looks like God dropped a contact lens," Stanley said to no one in particular.