Vel hadn’t seen a light bulb since his last day on Earth, two billion miles away. As the conquerors’ ship had risen through the atmosphere, he had pressed his face to the porthole and looked down at the pinpoints dotting the continents like a tangle of Christmas lights. A moment later, they had disappeared.

Now the sight rushed back at him as he took the bulb from the conqueror’s hand, and a rare smile broke out over his face. The alien towered over him, its dark feathery fur hiding its features and hanging to the floor like a cloak. It could kill with a touch—no one knew how. And it had handed him the most precious gift imaginable.

“You will make light,” the conqueror said in the strange monotone of the common language. “You will have tools.” It indicated a pile of objects on the metal table in front of him: screwdrivers, copper wire, batteries. More Earth treasures. “One coin.”

The conquerors’ currency was hard enough to come by, usually through tedious manual labor. By comparison, this work would be paradise.

“I accept the task,” Vel said.

He raised the light bulb to his face, and his smile widened—then vanished.

The dome of glass wasn’t glass, and the notched metal below wasn’t metal. He flipped the bulb over and, sure enough, recognized the logo of a toy company, long since destroyed. All the electricians in the solar system couldn’t produce a glimmer of light from this bulb. There wasn’t even a convenient on switch.

Vel glanced over at the conqueror, and it stared placidly back. It had never seen electricity; it had no idea that it had assigned an impossible task. And he had lived long enough to know that it would not accept failure.

He moved to the table and set his bag down beside the pile of equipment. Nobody had ever overcome a conqueror physically, and Vel doubted he could create enough of a distraction to escape. But there must be something he could use to his advantage.

Arranging the wires and batteries with one hand in an attempt to appear productive, he reached his other hand into the bag. His fingers closed around a handle of solid rubber beneath a mass of soft plastic netting. The umbrella was bright pink, with an animated princess emblazoned on the canopy—back on Earth, he would rather have died than carry it in public. But when the vendor had appeared at his door, hawking relics of the old world, he had spent every coin he owned to get it. All that mattered was to keep the past alive. Now he remembered the shell of clear plastic at the umbrella’s tip, which had once housed a battery-powered light.

He removed his hand from the bag, selected a few wires, and twisted one around a battery. Then he wound them all around the base of the bulb and set his completed “circuit” on the table. It wouldn’t have fooled a ten-year-old on Earth, but the alien would never know. His deception complete, Vel casually leaned his elbows on the table to block his bag from the conqueror’s view. He reached over and snaked the end of the umbrella out of the mouth of the bag. Keeping the pink netting hidden behind his arm and shoulder, he turned the bulb in his other hand as if making a final inspection, then put it down for the last time. The thought of being saved from certain death by a little girl’s plaything nearly made him laugh out loud.

As slowly as he could bear, Vel inched the tip of the umbrella directly behind the bulb. The plastic dome was just opaque enough to obscure the object hidden behind it. He could only hope that the light would shine through convincingly. His fingers found the button embedded in the rubber handle.

“Here is your light,” he said.

He slammed his thumb onto the button and waited to live.

Nothing happened.

Vel’s thumb ground into the button, and he stared through the bulb as if his eyes could charge the long-dead battery. Finally, heart thudding, he wrenched his gaze back to the conqueror. He wanted to see the deadly touch coming. He wondered if the last moment would hurt.

“Approved,” the conqueror said. A coin clanked onto the table, and the alien was gone.

Vel rushed out of the room with the coin in his fist, searching through his mind for an understanding of what had happened. A conqueror had shown mercy for an offense, something no one had witnessed in all the years of exile. Maybe the humans had been wrong all along. Maybe they should drop their fear and hatred of these beings and unite with them as one civilization. At the building’s exit, Vel passed a doorkeeper—a human. Unable to keep his good fortune to himself, he blurted out the whole story.

The doorkeeper looked around cautiously, then leaned toward Vel. He tried to whisper, but his voice rose with excitement.

“I knew it!” the man said. “I suspected for years. They can’t see! They make us believe they can, but it’s a lie.”

In the transparent street above the turquoise clouds, Vel flung the coin out of his sight like spoiled meat. For the first time, the destroyers of his world had shown weakness. With the right planning, who knew what might happen next?