I was still staring at him, trying to formulate an answer, when the door slammed open, spilling Mandy, Lucas, and David back into the room. I had a split second to register the smell of smoke and the sound of sirens before a much more urgent scent washed all of that away.

Blood.

Lucas was bleeding from a cut on his forehead. It looked like it had been made with a rock, splitting the skin from his eyebrow all the way back to his hairline. The wound wasn’t deep and it wasn’t serious enough to require medical care, but it was bleeding copiously, red sheeting down the side of his face and dripping onto the floor as he half-walked, half-staggered into the room, leaning heavily on David all the way.

There was a high, keening sound. I realized it was me. I swallowed hard, but it didn’t stop, just picked up from Tahlia and Jeff. All three of us were staring at the blood like it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen.

Toni shoved herself away from the wall, hurriedly moving to loop her arm around Lucas and drag him toward the bathroom. “You explain, I’m going to stop the bleeding before shit gets ugly,” she said, and they were gone, the door slamming behind them.

The tension in the room snapped like a hypnotist’s fingers, and we were free to move. I staggered backward, pressing a hand to the hollow of my throat, and Graham was there to catch me and hold me up. I wanted to thank him. I wanted to shove him away and tell him that he didn’t get to touch me anymore, not if he thought I had no business being here. I did neither. I just swallowed again, trying to steady myself enough to speak.

I wasn’t fast enough. “What happened?” demanded Jeff.

“There’s a riot,” said Mandy. “Which sort of makes sense, because the east side of town is on fire. The scout ship is moving.”

“Moving where?” asked Graham.

“Couldn’t tell you, wasn’t going to go and ask it,” snapped Mandy. “A giant alien death machine wants to stomp through a city, I am getting the fuck out of its way. So people are running and people are screaming and people are being assholes, because that’s what scared people do.”

“Someone threw a brick at us,” said David. “They would have done worse, but Mandy screamed that she saw the scout ship coming, and they turned and ran.”

“We still have the money, and we have the makeup,” said Mandy, holding up an overloaded plastic bag. “What’s a little looting during a full-scale riot?”

The air was clearing, and it was getting easier to breathe. I managed a shaky laugh. “Good to know where your morality bends,” I said. “How long do you think we have before the riot reaches us?”