“I’ll be blunt: you were a target of opportunity. The others have stayed close to home. They’ve surrounded themselves with people who would miss them. You put yourself into a position where we could take you and most of the people who might object at the same time.”

“You could have said ‘please.’”

“Could we? Could we have just strolled up to you and said ‘Hello, we’re from the government, we know you’re a representative of an alien species which may or may not intend to harm us, can we convince you to tell us all your secrets’? Because you’ll forgive me for being dubious if I say that sounds more than reasonably unlikely.”

“You could have tried,” I said stubbornly.

She sighed. “We have no way of knowing precisely when your ride will be here—but rest assured, we know it’s coming. They’re on their way.”

“You still could have tried.”

“Is there anything we could do to make you cooperate? As you say, we have you. To a certain degree, we can do as we like. But we would prefer you answer our questions willingly.”

Something about this whole situation didn’t smell right. Either I’d been taken captive by amateur hour—which didn’t match up with the way they’d been able to ground our plane before it reached Seattle—or they were trying, very hard, to pretend that I had. And whichever it was, I needed to get everyone else out of here. It wasn’t altruism; it was the mathematics of escape.

Once I was the only person here, I could focus on me. Once I knew Graham and the others were safe, I wouldn’t need to worry about getting them away, or about them being used as levers against me.

“I want my companions released,” I said flatly. “If the footage from the plane has made the news, I want some sort of public statement that they were detained in error. I want proof I’m your only ‘guest.’ Do that, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“You have no rights, no standing, and no way out,” she said. “Are you sure this is a deal you want to make?”

Again, something was off, and again, I couldn’t afford to care. “Yes,” I said firmly.

She smiled.

Sprout

… and looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

—H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

The only things we reap are the things we sow. I was sown. Is it time for the reaping to begin?

—Stasia Miller