"In every conceivable manner, our family is the link to our past and the bridge to our future."

-Alex Haley

"I can't be any clearer on how crystal clear I am being...It just stood up."

"It just stood up." The detective repeated.

Carina felt like bashing her had against the desk as Sam tried to explain what he had already explained to the police for what seemed like the millionth time.

"Wow. That's really neat." The detective turned and retrieved two cups before handing them to both Carina and Sam. "Time to fill 'em up."

Carina looked at the cup before looking back to the detective. "You think we're on drugs?"

"What are you rollin'?" He asked her. "Whippets? Goofballs? A little wowie sauce with the boy toys?"

"Excuse me?" Carina said in a low tone.

"We're not on drugs." Sam rolled his eyes.

"Then what's this?" The detective tossed a bottle that Carina recognized in the air and caught it. "Found it in your pocket...Mojo." He read off the container. "Is that what the kids are doing now? A little bit of Mojo?"

"Those are our dog's pain pills."

"It's a chihuahua." Ron offered.

The detective sighed.

He leaned back slightly and rubbed his eyes. When he did so, the hem of his leather jacket fell back, revealing his holstered service weapon.

He smiled when both Sam and Carina looked at it. "What was that?"

"Hm?" Sam looked back at him.

"You eyeballing my piece, fifty cent?"

Sam didn't reply.

"You wanna go?" The detective got closer to Sam, close withing kissing distance. "Make something happen. Do it...because I promise you I will bust you up."

"Are you actually going to charge us with anything?" Carina interrupted. "Or are you going to continued to make veiled, slightly racist threats to minors?"

"Carina-"

Ron tried to stop his niece, but even he knew that once Carina was angry enough, there was no filtering her words.

"You challenging me, little girl?"

The detective got moved so that he was right in front of Carina's face. Carina tried not make a disgusted face due to the man's breath.

"Because if you're challenging me, I will not hesitate to have you charged with resisting arrest."

Carina gave him a puzzled look. "Do you even know how the justice system works? You just brought us in for questioning. You haven't actually charged us or arrested us yet."

"That can't be proven."

"Are you on drugs?"

"Alright, enough." Ron stepped in. "Are you charging my kids or not?"

The detective with blonde hair was looking at his partner with a concerned look. "No, Mr. Witwicky. We just need you to fill out some paperwork to release her car into your custody and then you can go." He looked at his partner. "Dwight, step away from the kids."

After what seemed like an eternity; Sam, Carina and Ron were able to leave the police station. Carina and Sam got into the Thunderbird as Ron got into his own car.

"Are we going to talk about what happened?" Sam turned to his cousin.

Carina turned on the car and pulled the seatbelt across her body, wincing as she moved her shoulder. "I'm still not entirely convinced I didn't hallucinate last night."

"Samuel, what were you thinking?" Judy exclaimed as she guided Carina to a barstool. "You and Carina could have been seriously hurt!"

Carina sat on the barstool as he aunt pulled her jacket off her shoulders and moved her shirt to see Carina's shoulder. "It's wasn't his fault, aunt Judy. I was the one who went with him."

"Neither one of you should have gone chasing after some lunatic car thief." Ron turned to Sam. "And we're going to have a conversation about lying to the police when you get home from school young man."

"Oh, sweetie, this is already bruising." Judy turned to her husband. "Ron, I don't think she should go to school, this is going to be hurting her all day."

Carina quickly jumped off the barstool."I'm fine!" She smiled. "I can go to school...and besides, I have my genealogy report to give today."

"But that's your bad shoulder." Judy said "I don't feel comfortable sending you to school."

"My report is more than half my grade." Carina replied. "I can stick it out for the day."

Judy and Ron looked at each other. "History is your last class."

Carina nodded.

"You can go to that class and give your report." Ron said. "But I want you to come straight home and ice your shoulder. We don't want your injury getting worse than it already is."

"Alright." Carina nodded.

"What about me?" Sam looked to his parents.

Ron sighed. "Fine. You can have the day off to, but if Carina is going to history class, that means you're going to."

Sam groaned as Carina moved to the freezer and pulled out an icepack. She waved to her aunt and uncle as she moved toward the stairs to go to her bedroom.

She was glad her aunt insisted on her staying at home. She was so tired she felt like she had a fog cloud settled over her mind that prevented her from having full, concrete thoughts. She struggled to keep her eyes open all through the police questioning.

She climbed up the stairs and made it to her bedroom. She tossed her keys on her desk as she closed the door. She didn't bother changing her clothes as she climbed into bed and laid on the ice pack.

It was as soon as her eyes closed that she was thrown into a dreamless sleep.

"Carina, come on it's time for us to go if we're going to make it to class on time."

Carina groaned as Sam shook her awake.

"Come on Car, I'll drive. Just get dressed."

"Alright, I'm up."

Carina sat up in her bed and rubbed her eyes. Her shoulder still throbbed with pain, but it felt better than it had earlier. Carina moved to her closet an pulled out a fresh pair of jeans and a shirt. She knew she didn't have time to take a shower, but that didn't mean that she had to go to school looking like a train wreck.

She quickly got changed and ran a brush through her now knotted hair before she picked up her backpack from her desk chair before leaving her room.

She waved goodbye to her aunt who was working in the garden as she made her way to her car. Sam was already in the driver's seat with the engine running.

She tossed her backpack in the backseat as she climbed into the passenger seat.

"How's the shoulder doing?" Sam asked as he put the car into reverse.

"Sore and stiff." Carina replied. "But it's doing better."

"So...are we going to ever talk about last night?"

"The police thinks we're on drugs and your parents thinks we were lying. Maybe we should just drop it while we're ahead. It's possible we didn't see what we thought we saw."

Sam gave his cousin a confused look. "You know what we saw. We watched my car...come alive." Sam looked down at the steering wheel. "How do we know that your car isn't the same way?"

"I think we would know by now." Carina said. "Let's just forget about it for both our sake's, yeah?"

"Man, you're grouchy."

"Yeah, I tend to get that way when I don't get a whole lot of sleep."

Sam let her words hang out in the open air for a moment. "Thank you."

"Thank you for what?"

"For following me." Sam said. "For having my back. You didn't have to that."

Carina sighed. "Yeah, I did. You're my family. I've always got your back."

"The same goes for me." Sam smiled. "I've got your back, like Iceman and Maverick."

Carina looked at him. "Iceman and Maverick? Like from Top Gun?" She smiled. "When did you finally watch that movie?"

"I watched it with Miles the last time I was at his house."

"So which one am an I and which one are you?"

"You're obviously Maverick." Sam said. "I don't even know how that's the question."

"Why is that not a question?"

"Because you're exactly like Tom Cruise in that movie."

"I don't think so."

Sam laughed. "Of course you're not." He said sarcastically as he pulled into the high school parking lot. "But the point is, I've got your back."

Carina looked at him as he pulled into a parking spot. "Thank you." She said sincerely. "I'm glad to know that someone's on my side."

Carina collected her backpack as she climbed out of her car, locking the door in the process. Sam tossed her the keys as he too climbed out of the car.

The parking lot was mostly deserted except for a few other students who were making their way to whatever sport they had for their final period. She still felt exhausted even after sleeping almost the whole afternoon away, she was ready to be back at home and in her bed.

"For my genealogy report, I decided to it on a member of my mother's side of the family." Carina began. "While my father's side of the family is known for their exploration of our planet's oceans, my mother's side of the family was focused more on what laid beyond our small, blue marble."

Carina cleared her throat before she continued. She pressed the next button on her laptop, making the slide on the projector change to a black and white picture of a man dressed in a suit.

"My great grandfather on my mother's side, Emil Lainez, was also well known in the scientific community. In the early 20th century, my grandfather was one to the first men to publish scholarly articles about the theory that there was sentient live beyond our world. It was his belief that in the infinite universe that we lived in, it was theoretically impossible for human kind to be the only creatures capable of higher thought and feeling."

Carina changed the slide to a picture of a family.

"My grandfather Emil and his siblings were all involved with an astronomical science. While my grandfather studied astronomy as a whole, his brother Andre studied theoretical astronomy and all of it subfields, and his sister Maria studied optical astronomy. It was their love of the stars that defined my family's morals and traditions. It was also their generation that began the tradition of naming their kids after stars, a tradition that sparked the inspiration for my own name."

Carina clicked on the next slide, which was a picture of the first article that he grandfather ever published.

"In 1934, my grandfather published his first article. In part, in contained many equations and theories about life beyond our world, but at the time NASA hadn't been established and the field of astronomy was a science that was primarily built around hypothesis, which result in articles like my grandfather's being consider false science."

She clicked again the next button.

"It was because of this relenting criticism from the scientific community, that my grandfather sought to prove them wrong. Where he started was with an idea that had began in 1923...a space telescope, the likes of which would later inspire the creation on the Hubble Space Telescope. My grandfather fashioned a small scope as a rudimentary, small scale version of what he hoped to create one day. He envisioned, once the science of the star became more prominent, there would exist a telescope on earth that could see millions of light years away. His designs were one of the first to be used in observatory telescopes."

She changed the slide to a picture of two observatories.

"The Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii and the W.M Keck Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii are the most well known observatories to still use my grandfather's basic designs and theories in their research. It is with his articles and other sources that they are able to triangulate their telescope to certain areas of space, looking for planets whose atmosphere resembles our own."

She clicked to the last slide.

"My grandfather died when he was 75 due to an illness that was later thought to be tuberculosis. He did live to see NASA founded, and he was named of the fathers of astronomy in 2000 and is known to be one of the first Hispanic men to become a material part of a scientific research study that has existed in more than one century." Carina paused. "When he died, he left behind four kids: two sons and two daughters."

Carina turned to Mr. Hosney to signal that she was done.

"What does your name mean, Carina?" He asked.

"Carina is Latin for ship keel." She said. "But I was named after the constellation Carina, which was part of a larger constellation called the Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts in Greek mythology."

Mr. Hosney nodded. "Good job." He turned to the rest of the class. "Alright, who's next?"

Carina unplugged her laptop from the projector and closed it as she walked to her seat in the back of the class.

She hated public speaking.

While she was decent at it and could hold her own when it came to talking in front of crowds, the nauseous feeling of being in front of an audience always flared up when she knew she had to do a report or anything resembling standing up in front of others.

Carina scribbled on the corner of her notebook as the next student walked up the the front of the class room to present.

She didn't pay much attention to the next few students and their presentations. Her mind kept wandering back to the previous night. What had her and Sam seen? Was it really Sam's car that they saw? She kept going over the evening's events in her head, trying to come up with any other explanation to justify what they had seen, but couldn't come up with anything.

If what they saw really was Sam's car, what would that mean for them?

What was going to happen next?