“You need to get better at predicting what we need.”

“You need to tell me who you are.”

To my surprise, she smiled. “You really aren’t prepared for what you came here to do, are you?” she asked. “You should have figured it out by now.”

“Since the Men in Black aren’t real, I think I’m doing okay.”

“You’re not. Sadly, you’re not going to have a chance to recover from your own errors.” Her smile thinned, tightened, became the triumphant snarl of a predator. “Now that we know how to accelerate the changes, we may be leaving the field down a bit more frequently. We need something to show our superiors, if we’re going to get permission to move on to the next stage. You should be getting down on your knees and thanking me for letting your little ‘boyfriend’ leave. Do you really think he’ll want to touch you after the last of your skin peels away, and he can see you for want you actually are?”

I spat at her. It was a foolish, childish thing to do. It was the only thing I could think of.

She was still laughing as she walked out of the room. The door shut behind her, and I was alone. Sort of.

The problem with solitude in a place like this was that it wasn’t real. It was an illusion, designed to make me feel like I had privacy. I didn’t. I couldn’t. They were monitoring everything about me, from the amount I ate to the number of times I asked to be taken to the bathroom.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back in my seat and waited for the scientists to return. They had more tests to run—they always had more tests to run—and if my nameless captor was planning to leave the wireless field down again tonight, if she wanted to see the evidence of my nature continue to spread, they were going to want a complete picture of what I looked like right now. I was less human than I had been the day before, and I was more human than I was ever going to be again.

The thought should have distressed me. At the very least, it should have had me worried about the way the people I cared about were going to respond the next time they saw me. Would Lucas still be happy to rent me a room when he could no longer pretend that I was an ordinary woman with a weird fondness for claiming to be an alien? Would Mandy still want to be my friend?

Would Graham still love me?

Those were big questions. Important questions. Not as important as the question of who was actually holding me here. Of the alphabet agencies, the TSA and CDC seemed to be the least likely—the one because I would never have made it onto the plane in the first place, and the other because I wasn’t an infection. I wasn’t contagious. I was just from someplace else.