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into the quarry and kissed the face of the ice itself.
    â€œWhat was that?” Zeeko said shakily somewhere behind Benji. “Ellie, I can’t see anything, bring back my glasses!”
    â€œBenji Lightman,” said Ellie, coming down the embankment, “I don’t love this.”
    What is “this”? Benji started to say.
    But the junkyard spoke before he could.
    Up there in the dark beyond their cars, colossal pipes began to vibrate, to issue musical tones like harmonic ghosts.
    CR’s truck throttled to life, its headlights igniting, the light beams spearing across the lake, striking the ancient torpedo-shaped gas tanks on the opposite shore.
    The barrel of CR’s rifle lifted from the ground beside Benji, looking like a finger trying to scrape the sky. Then, as the chair had done, the gun flung itself into the air toward the lake.
    With an athletic instinct alien to him, Benji raised his hand and snatched the rifle in mid-flight. He looked back to CR and Ellie, who had come down to the shore and were watching inconfused fear. “You see that?” was all Benji could say, heart surging with wonder.
    The cloud had grown, obscuring the sides of the quarry. The gas tanks, which had glittered on the far shore, were all but invisible.
    It’s not “growing, ” he thought. It’s just coming closer. It’s coming at us.
    That’s stupid. Clouds don’t do that.
    Clouds don’t glow, either—
    At that moment, the cloud-light winked out.
    It happened all at once, like when someone trips on a cord and unplugs the Christmas tree. The junkyard became still and silent; the truck’s headlights snapped off.
    A horizontal seam opened in the fog.
    Slowly, a silhouette clarified from the mist.
    â€œWhat the ass is that . . . ?” whispered CR beside Benji.
    Goose bumps flew across Benji’s whole body, and a wild memory flared through his mind.
    As a boy, he’d loved the Wizard of Oz. Not the book or even the movie, but the Wizard himself, that titanic head that floated in space. Benji hadn’t seen the whole movie until he was older, only the scene when Dorothy met the Wizard, so for years he didn’t know there was “a man behind the curtain”; to him, the Wizard and his sorcery were real. And right now, gazing from the abandoned lakeshore as the silhouetted shape emerged and took charge of the night, the Wizard was what lit up in Benji’s mind. He thought of that dreadful, enchanted face. He thought of the Great and Terrible.
    â€œThat’s a flying saucer,” Benji said.
    The disc.
    The disc.
    The disc whirled fifty yards from the shore. It spun in thebright and soundless night above the false starscape of the lake. Lights, trillions of eerily beautiful green lights, blinked on the underbody of the craft. They illuminated its shape, which looked for all the world like two silver Frisbees whose lips had been fused.
    Benji felt a hand on his shoulder, heard CR say, “Leaving, holy shit, we’re leaving, let’s leave!” Ellie nodded and began retreating up the shore.
    A portal opened on the bottom of the saucer. A circular beam of atomic-green light blazed out and hit the lake. It had the effect of lightning: The ice glowed, then shattered with a sound like a thunderclap. Shards of ice floated upward in the light.
    Tractor beam.
    â€œOh my God!” Zeeko cried. “What is that? Ellie, please , give me my glasses!”
    Suddenly, as if realizing it was not alone, the saucer’s portal closed, cutting off the beam. The ice crashed down into the freshly opened crater in the lake.
    And the saucer began approaching the shore.
    â€œBenji— CR— Get up here!” Ellie shouted, her voice shaking.
    Thirty feet out now, the portal on the saucer’s belly opened again. Benji took a step backward, stumbled over his bootlaces, fell on his butt. CR lifted him to his feet, saying in the most frightened voice