“More signals have been coming in while you were out of play,” he said. “They’re getting strong enough that people with ham radios and satellite phones have started picking them up. They come in on just about every band humanity knows how to access, and they’re loud. I’d guess we have maybe a month before the armada gets close enough that we can pick them up within our broadcast range, and another month after that before they’re here.”

I frowned. “I thought our range was continental.”

“For now,” he said. “We’ve been reaching out. People are relocating, quickly, quietly, before the new security measures go into wide distribution. A surprising number of humans refuse to believe that we’re here.”

“It doesn’t help that NASA, for whatever reason, didn’t release any footage of themselves studying you,” said Mandy. “If they’d been smart, they would have made you the face of their invasion.”

“They were intending to,” said a man, walking in a few steps ahead of Tahlia. “Hello, Stasia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I blinked, running quickly through the list of names that could be his. He was roughly my age, with neatly brushed, side-swept brown hair and a carefully neutral expression, like someone had told him not to move his face too much lest he develop wrinkles. His suit probably cost more than any of us made in a year, even Lucas. If he and Toni’s father shopped at the same tailor, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Which meant …

“Hello, Senator.” I waved the hand that held my toast in what I hoped would look more like a polite greeting than a threatening gesture involving food. “I didn’t know you were coming here. I thought I was going to meet you in the forest.”

“Plans change,” he said, walking to the table and settling in one of the open seats. Mandy and Lucas were staring at him: one with hope, the other with fear. Toni and David appeared unflustered. Maybe growing up rich—or in David’s case, working with Toni, who was sort of a whole barrel of oiled ferrets in a woman’s skin—had inoculated them against this sort of thing. “Agent Brown decided to call a conference in Washington about the alien menace this morning, which seems to be her way of staving off accusations that she mishandled Miss Miller. Which means the cat is well and truly out of the bag. Even if she had managed to limit journalistic access to the event itself, no one was going to keep that quiet.”

“National security—” began Lucas.