Toni might like that. Then again, she might not. She had come close enough to assimilation that there was a chance the people who decided to organize against the invasion—assuming they did so in time—would decide she was on our side and not humanity’s.

Sides. It all came down to drawing sides.

I slipped my hand into Graham’s, holding tight, holding fast despite everything that was ahead of us. If I drew a side, I was going to make sure my friends were standing on it with me. That mattered more than planet, more than species, more than anything.

“So,” I said, and my voice was strong and steady. I was proud that it belonged to me. That was the voice of a woman who could survive an alien invasion, and see her people safely to the other side. “Do you have a guest room?”

3.

Jeff had three guest rooms, part and parcel of his ridiculously oversized house. I wasn’t sure why someone with such an attraction to solitude would want to have that many extra beds, but I also wasn’t going to argue with it. Not when it gave us a place to spend the night.

Toni and David were bedding down together, in the room closest to the front door, as if needing to run a little less to reach the door if Jeff and I decided to move on to human experimentation in the night was the solution to all their problems. I still wasn’t sure what their relationship was—friends, lovers, or simply very close colleagues—but it didn’t really matter, because Graham and I were, for the first time since leaving our hotel, finally alone.

Jeff had produced toothbrushes and toothpaste from a stockpile that looked like something from a survivalist compound, only grunting when I’d asked him why he had so many. He seemed like a very lonely man. Maybe that was explanation enough for why he’d tracked me down after meeting me in the forest: he was alone, and he wanted to find his own kind. The urge had to have an urgency for him that didn’t exist for me.

Not yet, anyway.

I sat on the edge of the futon that was going to be our home for the night, my sweater still on and my hand clamped over the bend of my elbow, like I could somehow force the world to take it back—to take it all back, all the way to the moment when Anastasia Miller had wandered into the woods and met the pretty flower that would steal her life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to exist. It was just that I wanted this all to have been easier. I wanted to have been one thing from birth until now, with no question of where my loyalties were going to go.