“We love you too,” they said simultaneously, and then we hung up.

I was a little shocked that I hadn’t seen Andy or Robin yet. I kept expecting them to walk in the room and it kept not happening. What I learned later was that as I lay there in bed, there had been a mad rush to keep our footage safe and secret while both the NYPD and the FBI attempted to find and control it.

Andy had gone back to his apartment, where he had seen a succession of uniforms asking him where his footage was. They couldn’t legally search his apartment, but apparently there was a pretty good chance they were listening in on our phone conversations and text messages. Of course, Andy didn’t have the footage, Robin did, and thus far, Robin hadn’t been a person of interest.

I knew none of this. I knew that what had happened to Martin Bellacourt was horrifying and impossible, but I wasn’t processing it as newly weird. Carl was a space alien, so weird was done with. As far as I was concerned, we were already at peak weird.

Hundreds of people had been killed in terrorist attacks, so while I assumed the fact that someone had tried to kill me was going to be in the news, I didn’t think it was going to be front page.

And I thought that as the day stretched into evening and I started to wonder why no one had come in to tell me I was being discharged. And then a tall guy walked into the room with an earpiece and an intensity of awareness and readiness that I had never seen before. After taking in the room, he came up to me and said, “Ms. May, I’m Agent Thorne, and the president will be here shortly.”

That was all the preparation I got. About five seconds later, another agent walked in, followed promptly by the president, a third agent, and a young woman in a suit. The president was wearing a blue blazer and white silk blouse. Her gray hair swept over her shoulders casually.

It was intensely surreal. There was a bit of that “Oh my god, they’ve got three dimensions and a size and a shape and I’m seeing a person with my own eyes that I have previously only seen through the eyes of cameras” feeling that you get with any famous person. That’s a weird thing, and it’s a very interesting and complex experience.

I had had that several times in my life by this point. But there was something much more impressive about the president. I mean, I was a big fan of hers, so there’s that. She and I shared a lot of values and goals, and she had done so many things that I respected and was amazed by. My appreciation for her was and remains very deep, and while I could hang with any Hollywood celebrity and not be intimidated by their status, this was a very different thing. I was intensely intimidated, and yet, at the same time, there was a frailness to her.

I don’t mean any particular physical frailty, of course. I simply mean that she was very much a human. Just bones and organs and stuff, like the rest of us. That became very real as she moved in to shake my hand. Firm, practiced, her skin rougher than I expected.

“April, it’s wonderful to finally meet you, I’m sorry it’s not under better circumstances. How are you doing?”

I wanted to ask her why she was here, but that seemed rude, so I just answered her question: “I’m fine. They say I can go home tomorrow, really just a scratch and some broken ribs. I’m more emotionally messed up than anything, to be honest.”

“You’re wondering why I’m here. Well, April, first, where is the footage from your attack? Everyone seems quite certain that it exists, and yet lots of people have failed in trying to find it.”

“You’re here for . . . my footage?” I was astounded.

“Among other reasons, yes. As I said, you have a way of being at the center of things, April. I am not holding that against you, and I hope it’s clear that we are friends, but there are a number of fast-moving parts right now that need to be either slowed or harnessed, and there is a lot of concern that the footage that was on that camera is one of them.” She was efficient as ever.

“You aren’t making a ton of sense to me,” I said.

“Be that as it may, I need your footage.”

I was caught off guard and did not really know how to handle it, so I stalled.

“It’s starting to feel a little bit like I need to know what will happen to me if I don’t get you the footage.” I said “get” instead of “give” to make it clear that I didn’t have it.

“Nothing, April. To me, you, whether you like it or not, are a member of the press. It would be an extraordinary step for me to take information away from you or bar it from being broadcast. That would be the sort of thing that requires lawyers and judges, and I have neither the time nor the desire to go that route. But I can, as the president of the United States, ask you to do me a favor.”

“Oh, maybe it would be better if I understood why?”

She seemed to think about this very hard for several seconds before she launched in on me. Her face got hard; her voice became darts.

“April, we are aware that someone tried to kill you last night. We believe it was the same man who tried to kill you this afternoon. Whatever possessed you to not report the shooting and then to walk out of your building unguarded, I’m. Not. Asking. Maybe it was the foolishness of youth, maybe it was more than that. But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now.”

She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark.

“This new history is one in which the alien technology that we’ve come to know as the Carls allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of people to die, and then, today, clearly and intentionally killed a man rather than allow harm to come to you.”

“Well,” I said, and then paused for a long time. “Wait, you think Carl killed that guy?”

“April, Martin Bellacourt’s bones and organs and blood—everything except his skin—are now, as far as our best people can tell at the moment, grape jelly.”

Long pause . . .

“Grape jelly?” I asked.

She did not respond. I thought back to the ambulance—to the grape-flavored lip gloss. My stomach turned, and then a wave of anxiety washed over me and sweat prickled out over my entire body.

“What are they?” I asked quietly, unable to stop myself.

“We don’t know, April.”

Her strength was so comforting, so calming, that I finally asked her the question I hadn’t even been able to ask myself: “Are they bad?”

“April, I don’t know.” I caught a tiny glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes before she went on as confident as before. “What I do know is that we don’t just have a space alien, dream-infecting robot visiting every city in the world, we have a space alien, dream-infecting robot killer. I want very much to frame this correctly and be a voice of reason. However, I feel strongly that you or one of your”—she searched for a word—“posse . . . are right now working on a video that, while probably very good, will not necessarily have all the nuance the US government is looking for right now. So, please, if you could, allow us to analyze your footage and do not release anything for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Certainly there are already other videos out?” I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone was livestreaming at the time.

“There are, but it’s blurry cell phone footage. No one on scene had a camera as nice as yours. Please, just do this for us.”

“And after twenty-four hours we can post our video and you won’t want to review it or stop us from posting it?”

“April, I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the internet, you can’t contain information anymore. Plus there’s the whole First Amendment. It’s one of the bigger rules.”

“I’ll get you the files right away,” I said. “Where should they be delivered?”

“Here,” she said.

“Right here?”

“I would rather not leave without them.”

I took out my phone and called Robin.

“Robin, I need you to make a copy of Andy’s footage from today and bring it to me in the hospital.”

“Are you sure?”

“The president is here. We made—” I looked her right in the eyes as I said it. “We made a deal.” She smiled at me.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.

I hung up.

“We have twenty minutes,” I said to the president of the United States of America.

“Well, we have some other things to discuss. I’ve talked to your doctors and they said you could go home, but I was wondering if you could stay an extra day so that I could come by with the press tomorrow? They’ll ask you a few questions, mostly they’ll take pictures and video of me walking in and talking to you. I have to be shown being active right now or everyone will say, ‘Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.”

I laughed.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You’re”—I felt dumb as I said it—“really a person, aren’t you.”