Our safe house was located in Tucson, Arizona, just like the NASA facility where I’d been kept. With NASA locking down travel pathways, moving seemed like a bigger risk than holding still, especially since the relay network of scouts was finally beginning to pull itself together.

Each of us, according to Tahlia, had a “broadcast radius” of approximately three hundred miles, growing exponentially every time another mind was added to the group. With the three of us sharing one physical location, our personal pathway to the forest was almost three thousand miles in diameter. We could talk to our own kind all over North America, and as we made contact with them in the forest, we extended our range even further.

Given thirty of us in the right places, we could cover the entire planet. It was a daunting thought that held its own strange appeal. What would it be like to talk to members of my own species anywhere in the world? And when the invasion started, what would happen then? How far would we reach?

Would we reach the stars?

The safe house was about ten miles outside of the city proper, secured for our use by a staffer of the senator Tahlia mentioned before. Thanks to him, we had all the privacy we could ask for, along with a fence around the entire property and an empty swimming pool which Graham assured me was absolutely full of rattlesnakes during the day, when they came out to sun themselves on the tile.

We also had space enough for each of us to have our own room—and for about eight other people to have their own rooms, too. That made me more than nervous. It looked like we were planning to be here for a while, and to bring others here as well. We were digging in for the long haul … or at least until the sky went dark with alien ships, and the world changed forever.

The room I was going to be sharing with Graham was small and featureless. White walls, white curtains, a door connecting to the back yard and the aforementioned empty swimming pool, and a bed large enough to hold us both, plus another couple if we started running out of space.

Graham waited until I was seated on the bed before closing the door and turning to face me, his hands folded behind his back like he was getting ready for a job interview. “So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed.

“Did they hurt you?” He looked at me, eyes wide and pleading for a no. He’d always been easy to read, and right now, he might as well have been a billboard. “Those NASA bastards, did they hurt you? Did they … do anything?”