Chapter 34: Summary
Everly clutched the blanket, grinding her teeth viciously, thinking how cruel fate could be.
In the very beginning—the absolute beginning—it all traced back to a meteorite that had fallen from the sky.
On the morning after the meteorite landed, an accident occurred while the townspeople were moving it. They accidentally knocked it and cracked it open. At the scene of the split meteorite, Everly once saw Carter bend down and pick up something small from the ground.
It was a very, very tiny detail. After all, Carter wasn’t the only one collecting stones from the crater that day—Everly herself went later too—so at first glance, nothing seemed wrong.
The next day, Everly happened to pass by and overheard Carter bragging to someone about his “alien egg.” That egg was later snatched away by the boy who bullied him and thrown into the grass.
This, too, was an extremely trivial matter. With the recent craze over space and the universe, eight out of ten boys Everly knew were boasting about similar things—claiming they’d seen a UFO on their way out, or that prolonged exposure to meteorite radiation had given them superpowers. One boy even called the police to report that his parents were aliens in disguise—because they wouldn’t let him eat chocolate after dinner… After hearing so many ridiculous stories like that, people naturally lost the vigilance they should have had.
And so, through a twist of fate, Everly missed the chance to stop the disaster in advance.
Later, she specifically went around asking people and learned that—including Carter—all the students who had seen the “alien egg” that day died during the mutated cockroach attack on the school.
As a result, even until the very end, Everly was never able to determine whether that terrifying cockroach queen had hatched from the alien egg—or whether a local cockroach had accidentally eaten the egg and mutated as a result.