“I mean explosive devices primed to explode if someone steps on them,” he said. “Sometimes it rains raccoon in the middle of the night, which is messy, but I know nobody’s going to break in.”

“What the hell?”

“You just said that,” he said, and glanced meaningfully over his shoulder at the others as they climbed out of the van. “Maybe you should go fill your friends in, before they decide to go for a walk off the beaten path and get themselves a one-way ticket to kingdom come.” Then he strolled toward the porch, leaving me to decide which way to turn.

Graham’s voice drifted around the van, slightly raised in the way I’d come to recognize as uncertainty. He got boisterous when he didn’t know what else to do. A boisterous Graham was a Graham inclined to do big, bold things that made him look confident—like walking into a stranger’s field to poke around for snakes.

I spun on my heel and ran toward the voices. Sure enough, there was Graham, moving toward the edge of the driveway, clearly intending to go on an unchaperoned field trip. I put on an extra burst of speed, grabbing his arm before he could step into the grass. Graham turned to blink at me, surprised.

“Land mines,” I said.

His surprise melted away, replaced first by shock, and then by horror. “Land mines?” he echoed, at a much higher volume. “Stasia, what the hell?”

“That’s what I said when he told me about them.” I glanced over my shoulder at the house. Jeff was on the porch. He’d produced a tablet, and was typing something out—presumably the code to deactivate the security systems. There must have been more than one. There was no other reason for things to have taken this long.

I looked back to Graham. He was still staring at me. At least he wasn’t trying to pull his arm away. “He’s not a friend. He’s just someone who could get us out of there.”

“That’s not what you said this morning.”

I resisted the urge to look away. “I lied this morning.”

“I figured that out.” The horror slipped out of his eyes, leaving something even more distressing behind: disappointment. “I just can’t figure out exactly why. How do you know this guy?”

The forest. The dreams that weren’t dreams, that were some kind of … what? Neural network generated by people like me who were trying to live among the humans, all while knowing we would never really belong with them? It was as good an answer as any, and it wasn’t a good answer at all.

“I don’t know how to explain,” I said, and watched the storm clouds roll in on Graham’s face like a warning of trouble to come. “Graham…”

“Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and backed off.