The woman sighed. “Don’t you feel any loyalty for the nation—for the planet—that raised you? That gave you everything you needed to succeed? These aliens dropped you here like you didn’t matter. They programmed you to reveal yourself to the most casual questioning. You don’t have any weapons. You don’t have any defenses apart from a camouflage that’s already started to fail. Why would you choose them over us?”

“Well, for a start, they didn’t pull me off a plane in front of a hundred witnesses and lock me in a cell with no windows so they could lecture me about how I’m not a citizen,” I said. “Where are my friends?”

“The little one is selling you out as fast as her mouth allows.”

“You already told me you’re not going to listen to her. Where are my friends?”

“You have a very one-track mind.”

“So far, you’ve threatened me indirectly, and threatened to withhold Graham’s hormones,” I snapped. “My one-track mind is focused on their safety.” And, on some level, on the idea that if I could keep her talking, she couldn’t do anything else. She would have to stay here, talking to me, until she convinced me to reveal … whatever it was she thought I was going to reveal. Some grand invasion scheme. Some details about my species. Something.

There were details about my species contained in this room, details not even I knew about. All they had to do was take their argument that I was not a citizen to its logical conclusion, and cut me open. They could probably learn more about the coming invasion from the structure of my lungs and the tensile strength of my bones than they could from talking to me, no matter how endlessly they chose to do so.

I couldn’t stop that from happening. All I could do was continue buying time, and hope that someone—Graham, or Mandy, or the strangers from the plane—would come up with a way to get us out of here.

“What if I guaranteed their safety—what if I was willing to sign a contract promising they would not, under any circumstances, be harmed while in our custody—in exchange for your cooperation?” The woman’s voice dropped half an octave, becoming cajoling, almost conspiratorial. “They don’t know anything, apart from ‘you exist,’ and honestly, everyone is about to know that. We could even release them, if it meant you would allow us to perform the necessary tests.”

“You’re going to do those anyway.”

“Yes.” There was no shame or hesitation in her declaration: she had a job to do, and she was going to do it, regardless of my feelings on the matter. “But your cooperation would make things substantially easier. Anyone can vivisect an unwilling subject. Studying a willing one is much more profitable.”

“Who are you?”