A gusty breeze billowed her cape out behind her, and she laughed at herself. She had been wild and crazy, dancing around; it had been wet. She had certainly done it herself, in her haste. She had slipped, and put out her own hand… slowly, she raised her hand to the smear. The right height, perhaps, if she’d slipped in the wet. If she’d caught herself there, it could have happened. She didn’t remember it, but she did remember slipping and sliding a lot as she hurried from house to house, desperate to mark all the doors. She felt cold anyway. She wanted the sun on her shoulders. She took off the blue cape, and folded it over her arm, untied the hat and held it in her hand. The sun’s heat eased her, calmed her. It was all right. The animals were all right, and she was safe, and she would take a long nap this afternoon. In fact — she looked around. She had long since slept in other beds than the one she thought of as “her own.” On a day like this, with the wind in this quarter, her own bedroom would be muggy and unpleasant. Two houses down, though, she knew of an east-side bedroom with two windows. Since she opened the houses only when she was in them, it would have stayed shady and cool in the morning. On this door, the yellow hand-print had dripped only a little. Ofelia pushed the door open and went inside, leaving it open behind her. Dim light came from the shuttered windows; she smelled a faint mustiness. She really should air the houses out more often, she thought. She opened the bedroom shutters and felt the mattress on the bed. Not damp at all; something else must have been damp. Possibly clothes left in a closet. She tried to remember whose house this had been, but she wasn’t sure. On this side of the settlement, some houses had been lost to the two big floods; people who survived the flood had insisted on moving to the higher side, and younger people moved into the rebuilt houses. Not that it mattered now. Ofelia lay down on the bed and stretched. While she liked the familiar hollows and humps of her own mattress, it was sometimes nice to sleep on a different one. Her hips felt a little too high, her shoulders a little too low, but she was tired enough to doze off anyway. When she woke, the light outside had a pearly quality; the sun must have gone down. She was aware that she had been dreaming, a vivid dream involving colors and music and movement, but it vanished so fast that she could not retrieve any of it. She stretched again, and stood up slowly. Again that musty smell; her nose wrinkled. Perhaps she should leave the lights on in this house, to dry it out. She closed the shutters, turned on the lights, and went out, shutting the door behind her. In the twilight, colors and shapes seemed to float, unrelated to daytime geometry. Ofelia blinked, shrugged, and walked back home. With such a good nap behind her, she would have the energy to work on her beading tonight. Or even the log… she felt a little guilty when she realized how long it had been since she added anything interesting to the log.

The current date surprised her again. Had it been that long since the other colonists had come… had died? Ofelia sat a long time, wondering what to write. She had been lonely; she had been frightened; she still didn’t want to think about what had happened.

They were not my people, she wrote finally. But I am sorry, sorrier because I did not want them to come.

And their families think they died alone; they do not know someone is here to grieve for them.

Then she scrolled through the calendar, making short notes when anything caught her notice. Her back ached; her hip had stiffened. She turned off the computer finally, and pushed herself up. How it hurt to move when she had been still too long! It seemed impossible that she could get older, feel older, but she was definitely stiffer than when Barto had left.

In the sewing room, she eyed her beadwork with distaste. If she sat down again, she would stiffen into place. But she wasn’t sleepy yet. She leaned on the table, pushing the beads around idly. When she was young, she had had a necklace of brilliant blue beads streaked with silver and copper. She had left them behind, for her sister, when she married Humberto. He had never liked that necklace; he had suspected it was a gift from Caitano. He had been right, though she never admitted it to him. She wished she knew how to make such a beautiful color. The fabricator had color settings, but its version of dark blue was a dull, muddy color, nothing like the color she remembered.

She touched the dried cornhusks; they rustled under her fingers. Twisted into fat, stiff ropes, cornhusks might be the edging she wanted for the new cloak. She could dye them — she stopped, her skin puckering suddenly with alarm. What…? Not a sound, though her ears strained to hear past the pounding of her own blood. Nothing to see when she turned slowly, eyeing everything around her. Nothing. Nothing, but — she was still alert, still certain of danger.

That smell. The same smell as at the other house. Musty, she had thought, and yet when she came to think about it, not the same as mildew. A thicker smell than mildew. Her heart hammered in her chest; when she put her fist to her side she was not surprised to feel the rapid throb on her chest wall. She had to swallow, though her mouth was suddenly dry.

“I am here,” she said to the darkness outside, the silence, the emptiness. Her voice sounded odd, scratchy like a bad broadcast. “Come out if you are there.” She had no idea who, or what, she was talking to. Ghosts of the slain? She did not believe in ghosts, exactly, although she had seen Humberto once, six months after he died. He had been wearing a white suit, and a blue hat; he had been smiling at another woman, and when she said his name, he vanished. But did ghosts smell? Humberto had not smelled, as a ghost; he had merely slid, an immaculate and dimensionless image, across her sight that one time. Ofelia held her breath a moment, then breathed in, not quite sniffing. Yes, whatever this was smelled, and smelled different. New. It was most likely an animal, something from the forest grown bold enough to venture into the town, though the forest creatures had never done so before. With what confidence she could muster, Ofelia walked out of the sewing room to the front door of the center. Light spilled out the doorway from behind her, and her shadow stretched away from her feet. She could see nothing but the light patches on either side of her shadow. Inside the door were the switches for the exterior lights, rarely used even when the colony had been there. Now she turned them on. Only two of the bulbs came on; the others must have been damaged by storms. But in that skewed light, she saw something move, down the street.

A monster. An animal. An alien.

A deadly alien, which had already killed humans.

Ofelia could not make herself walk out into the street, or back into the center. She could not even turn off the lights. She looked the other way. Something else moved there, a dark shape against darker night. It came closer, a massive bluntness, manylegged, eyes glowing in the light… Cows. Ofelia sagged against the doorframe as several cows strolled up the lane. Between them, a calf pranced. One of the cows, with a switch of her tail, slapped the handprint on a door. So that had been cows. And the smell — was that cow? Hard to tell, but the cows added a ripe, complex odor to the lane. “Cows,” Ofelia said aloud. The cows startled, ears wide, seeming almost to lean away from her voice. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to butcher the cows for scaring her so. “AAOOH!” she bellowed, without knowing it was coming, a bellow from her gut that hurt her throat coming out. The cows ducked, whirled, and galloped off, loud thunder of hooves in the lane. “Stupid cows!” Ofelia yelled after them. Full of righteous indignation, she flicked off the lights in the center, and stalked across to her own house. Now that she had spoken, she found she wanted to keep talking, to feel words in her throat again, to hear her voice in her outside ears, not just in her head. “Silly of me to be scared of cows. I should have known they came into the streets at night — there’s no gate, after all.” But even as she said it, she wondered… she had never found manure between the houses, and why would they come? If they foraged in the gardens regularly, she’d have found damage from that.