It was stupid to drive the garbage-choked causeway of Section Seventeen just for a few minutes of air-conditioning in-between clients, but ugh, the heat was just an animal today. Her native co-workers assured her that it would start cooling off in September, but then it would also start to rain every day, and in addition to the new and improved smell that would create, she’d also be walking this road ankle-deep in trash-water. After that, it would be October and icing over. Then November, when the mercury might start dipping into single digits and possibly stay that way until late February. Then it would be storm season, and after the usual batch of tornados, it would be May and back in the nineties. All of which certainly seemed to prove Kate’s theory that they only put the aliens here because it was the worst place they had available to put them.Now it was Friday—a breezeless, cloudless, joyless Friday—and at just after nine o’clock in the morning, it was already ninety-three degrees and rising.
