Huck felt a sting on his neck and slapped it. He tilted his palm to see the squished mosquito under the desk lamp then flicked it away and wiped his hand on his pants. He returned his attention to the thick Bible under the lamp and stood and closed the small window without taking his eyes from its tiny text.

Laughter from across the house drifted through the quiet room and Huck considered opening the window again. He dragged the thick tome to the bed and fell into it, pulling a pillow over his ears and reading on his side. He caught himself drifting off, so stood and paced to get his blood pumping, then returned to the desk. His roommates eruptions interrupted him again.

The spot on his neck swelled up, as sometimes mosquito bites did with Huck's sensitive skin. His grandmother had claimed that she was allergic to even a fly landing on her, and insisted that mosquitos sometimes ganged up and tried to kill her! Huck had always wondered if mosquitos had really tried to kill grandma.

He picked up the book and carried it with him, reading under the single bulb as he bumped along the hallway. His roommates sat huddled in the living room, each with a wireless controller in their hands and a plate of greasy food in their laps. Huck glanced at them as he passed through and walked into the kitchen. He dropped his book on the counter and put a piece of ice on the mosquito bite and ate a hard granola bar over the sink. He stuffed the wrapper in a bag on the counter and picked up his book and continued reading on his way back through the living room.

"Hey Huck, wanna play?" George lifted the complicated controller over his head.

Huck stopped and looked at the molded plastic and the enormous flat screen television. "Why aren't you studying for finals?"

"I'm ready," Drew said, thumbing through pictures of heroes on the screen.

"I only have two," George offered. "One's a retake from last semester."

Huck wrinkled his brow at them and sighed. "Can you at least keep it down? Dr. Namms is picky about semicolons and stuff." He returned to his book and ignored the roommates. The ice melted on his neck and soothed the bite, so he held it there until the last tiny sliver slipped from his fingers and down his shirt. He wasn't accustomed to the dry heat in Utah, which had worsened his asthma and often left him feeling sick. He coughed thinking about it.

Leaned back in his chair, Huck read and reread the words, trying to commit the helpful mnemonic devices and notes to memory. He recited verses quietly to himself, drawing punctuation in the air, then checked his work studiously. Occasionally he picked up a pencil from the desk and made a small, neat notation in crisp block letters in the pages of his book, sometimes erasing and adding it back again and again. He fell asleep late slumped over his Bible on his desk.

Huck showed up half an hour early to his last final and sat against the wall outside the classroom. He was nervous and his skin itched and he felt like someone was watching him. His classmates made small-talk as they arrived, but Huck couldn't follow the conversation. He didn't usually say much anyway, so no one noticed.

His final was a blur. Huck couldn't tell if time was moving too slowly or too quickly, and while he recognized the words being penned roughly in the blue book and knew somehow that they were correct, didn't feel particularly in control of the penmanship or feel as he were remembering verses. He finished writing just as time elapsed and was among the last to turn his work in. He clumsily thanked Dr. Namms and hustled into the hall and out the door faster than he intended.

Huck hit the sunlight and felt his legs give out under him. A teacher and another student helped him up and walked him to health services, where he sat for a while before being checked out by a nurse and sent home. He walked across campus in a daze, still feeling like he was being watched, and still unsure of the speed of time.

The apartment wasn't empty but his roommates ignored him in favor of their packing. He went to his room and sat on his bed and didn't do anything for the rest of the afternoon.

A shrill sound snapped him aware some hours later. A mosquito caught his attention and he reached out and attempted to grab it, but missed. A second zipped through his peripheral vision and he snapped his head to see what he thought to be a small swarm of mosquitos. They broke up as soon as he saw them, scattering into the shadows.

"Hey guys?" Huck started, shooting to his feet. He crossed the room and flipped on the light. The fan started spinning, producing a hum that increased as it picked up speed. Huck paced the small room a few times but saw no further mosquitos. The window was open a quarter-inch, so he slammed it shut and locked it. " He continued to see movement in his peripheral vision, but it always darted away when he looked toward it. "Guys I'm going nuts."

Another high pitch flew by his ear and he slapped at it and spun. A larger swarm of maybe fifty or a hundred mosquitos bunched up together. They scattered when he took a step toward them, cascading in neat streams along the light-colored walls to form smaller groups on either side of him. Whichever way he turned his head the groups would scatter, while those unseen would gather until he looked at them again. There seemed to be more of them everywhere he looked.

"Guys," Huck called meekly. "The Devil maybe..."

The swarm produced an audible buzz and grew agitated. More zipped around him, playing a symphony of whines. Huck flailed at them, but the tiny bugs deftly avoided his attacks and continued to circle. He opened his mouth to yell again, but the stream of bugs closed in and forced him to the floor. He waved his arms in panic and prayed furiously and thought about his grandma, who by now he was sure had been killed by mosquitos. He crawled along the floor to the desk, then raised up and threw the window open as wide as he could and swung at the insects to leave.

Dozens of larger flying insects poured into the room, their warm buzzes drowning out the shrill mosquitos still whipping around Huck's head. He recognized the long, green cicadas coming through his window and his heart sank. The Lord had sent a pestilence to his bedroom on this night.

Huck's prayers intensified. He remembered impure thoughts brought about by the Jaguar's Club billboard, the time he'd seen Angela Burkett's boobs down her shirt when climbing the big tree, the movies he'd watched with his roomates those three times. Four times. Was four times too many?

Him and Jacob Truman had stolen the flagpole they claimed they'd made together. They took a roll of quarters from his dad's closet and rode their bikes to the arcade to spend them. They snuck out and swam at the country club in the middle of the night more times than he could count. They rented a pay-per-view movie about basketball players at a hotel and pretended it was an accident.

A stream of cicadas flooded the room, a hundred or more flying around haphazardly through the thickness of smaller insects. Huck watched them come in through the window, but remained crouched in front of his desk praying as they flew around him.

Huck asked forgiveness for everything he could remember and more. The noise only grew louder. Locusts were a bad sign. He couldn't remember them ever having been focused on anyone else's bedroom in the Bible. Whatever he'd done, Huck knew it was way worse than naughtiness. The locusts hovered so close Huck could feel the beating of their wings. He closed his eyes and sobbed and accepted the judgement of God for whatever it was he had done.

The bugs quietened and streamed back out the open window neatly, leaving Huck on his knees alive and alone in front of his desk. He prayed for a long time after they departed then staggered into the living room and fell in a beanbag and watched Drew and Sumner play their game until they decided to go to bed. By the time he returned to his room he'd already begun to doubt what he'd seen. He crawled into bed and picked up his Bible and fell asleep trying to understand the message God was sending him.

Counselor Iktrng Darby-Orris powered down his tiny spacecraft on the desk near Huck. He removed his helmet and dropped it at his feet with his two short arms and opened a flask with his bottom long arms. He passed the flask to his shorter arm and took a swig then passed the container back to his long arms to put it away. He pressed a series of buttons and the cockpit around him hissed and the seat rocked back. Once he was comfortable Iktrng pressed the speed-dial button back to his firm and waited for the interether call to connect.

"Brgclaw, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, and Blewp, how can I direct your call?"

"Case fourteen eighty, please," Iktrng replied calmly. Soft music played for a minute.

"Ik, is that you?" a gruff voice sounded over the coms.

"Yeah, Uncle Bernie, it's me."

"You find the kid?"

"We found him. He's scanned but hasn't been served yet. I'm sitting on him now."

"He look special to you?"

"Not really."

"Tell me somethin, when's the last time we took a client from Earth?"

"I wouldn't know, Uncle Bernie."

"Because it's never. There's somethin here that don't make sense."

"We bring in new crooks all the time."

"Not from Earth, nobody does. They don't live long, just a couple a years. Can't enslave em, can't trade with em, can't do anything with em. If you weren't within crashing distance of this one we'd never have heard of it."

"Then why are they here?"

"I dunno, Ik, and that's what bothers me. Look, be careful with this one, I think..."

A soft chime sounded outside the closed window and grew louder.

"They're here, Uncle Bernie," Iktrng cut him off. "I'll be fine. We'll get his papers, post bail right here, and you can ask him about this yourself. Iktrng out." He punched off his transmitter and sat his seat up.

The soft chime belonged to a small ship that cast a blue light and flew through the window as if it wasn't there. It made a slow circle around Huck's sleeping frame, then crossed the room and landed next to Iktrng's ship, dwarfing it in size. A side door opened and four armored squids motored out on small tracked vehicles.

Iktrng climbed out of his ship and held his hands up and walked toward the closing soldiers.

"Iktrng, really? On Earth?" one of them bellowed from afar.

"Hey Terpodloxl, I thought that was you!" he called back happily. "How's Andoxplotxla and the squirts?"

"I have a warrant," one of the squids growled when they got close.

"Get soft with that warrant, jellybear," Iktrng fired back.

"What did you just call me, bug?" the blob retorted, motoring his personal vehicle to bring him flaps to eyes with Iktrng.

"Take it easy, Ldoxyplotl," Terpodloxl ordered.

The squid fell back a short distance and Iktrng dropped his hands. "Yeah, take it easy. I'm ready to post bail," he said to Terpodloxl.

"He's not even served yet."

"Then serve him so I can post bail."

Terpodloxl looked at Iktrng's two-seat ship. "You know Earthlings don't live long, right? This one will die in your jump seat before you get anywhere. I hear they can stink."

"I've heard that too," Iktrng groaned. "But they sent me here, same as you. A client is a client, right?"

"Well put, Counselor. All right, let's get this done."

Terpodloxl pressed a button on his scooter and a drone popped out of the hull of the large ship and flicked across the room to Huck. It circled a couple of times, then emitted a wide blue beam that lifted Huck from the bed and carried him above the floor.

Huck woke up and found himself hanging from a beam of light focused into a tiny point above him. His first thoughts were of rapture and of himself being lifted into the Heavens. His following thoughts were of being squeezed by a beam of light while watching several gallons of blood and water spray out of his pores. Then he was standing on a desk with a squid on an army tank and a mosquito who smelled of whiskey.

"Huck Sanders?" a squid asked him.

"Ow. Yeah. God?"

"I'm Terpodloxl, with the Office of Justice. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please come along peacefully for your trial." He held a small cube toward Huck.

Huck looked at Terpodloxl, then at the six foot mosquito. "I don't understand."

"I'll take that," Iktrng said, reaching for the cube. "Huck Sanders is represented by Brgclaw, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, and Blewp. We'll post bail now and I'll see to it that he's present for his trial."

Terpodloxl pulled the cube away and backed up. His three companions did the same, widening their spacing and rolling out of Iktrng's range. "Sorry, today there's no bail."

Iktrng lowered his head and shook his proboscis. "There has to be bail," he said in a slow drawl. His hands fell toward a series of devices scattered on and around his belt.

"There are four of us, Iktrng," Terpodloxl said to his old friend. We know what refusing bail means as much as you do, but you don't have to invoke the law here. It's not worth it."

"A client is a client, Terpodloxl," he growled back. "You're not leaving me much choice."

"This is Heaven," Huck said suddenly. "You all are angels and demons."

The squid people grew taller and turned their vehicles toward Huck. Terpodloxl wheezed out "what did you just..."

A series of pops brought the question to an end. Two of the squids slumped over and sagged on their scooters, one fell over, and one moved slowly forward, picking up speed until it ramped off the edge of the desk.

Iktrng holstered his smoking guns and grabbed Huck. "Get in the spaceship if you want to live."

Iktrng lifted the pilot's seat up and Huck climbed into a tight compartment with a hard cushion. The front seat crashed down in front of him and he heard a series of pops from outside, and felt the ship rock. Iktrng dove into the seat in front of him and fired beneath the lowering cockpit. Huck's stomach turned as they vaulted into the air, then he was thrown violently against the seat in front of him and saw stars.

"They don't wear seat belts on Earth?" Iktrng yelled at the annoying client crashing into his seat back.

Huck guided himself back to the hard cushion and found two hard pieces of rough plastic that locked slightly above his knees. He considered saying nothing, but leaned forward and said between the seats, "it doesn't fit."

"Just say seat reset, then tell it, um, tell it Cenoninite."

"Seat reset. Cenominate," he repeated.

The cushion softened and raised, the ceiling expanded and the walls widened, and soft lighting filled the cabin. The seat belt fit comfortably around his waist. Panels around him gave way to unobstructed views in all directions, and they indicated that the ship was passing through thinning cloud cover. Then Huck could see the moon clearer than ever before in his life, and an endless field of stars around it. He looked behind him and could faintly see the little dots of light representing civilization on the landmasses fading into the clouds behind him.

"This isn't happening," Huck said very quietly.

Iktrng's seat rotated he stared at a terrified Huck for a long time. "Say that again," he commanded. Say 'this isn't happening.'"

"This isn't happening," Huck repeated. The ship's engines continued throttling up and and the moon grew rapidly larger in front of them, then beside them, then behind them, and finally into a dot behind them. "This really isn't happening."

"Okay you're special." Iktrng turned his seat around and pressed the accelerator to full. "Let's get you the hell away from the feds before they kill us both."

Next: /moj/chapter02