Nothing felt easy to me. Graham and I were strapped next to each other in the rear seat, with me providing a buffer between him and Tahlia, and I had never felt like we were farther apart. Not in college, when we’d had a series of fights over his gender identity and my sexuality, culminating with him telling me to go find a woman if I wanted to be a lesbian so badly, and me screaming in the quad that I didn’t love him for what he had in his pants, I loved him for the way he made me feel, which had been funny afterward, given that he’d been making me feel like shit. Not after college, when he’d been traveling the world, meeting people, becoming the exciting scientist he’d always wanted to be, while I’d been sinking deeper and deeper into my haze of customer service jobs and unpaid student loans. Somehow, we’d always managed to find our way back to one another, no matter how far away we seemed to be.

Except now. Now, it felt like we had finally found the thing that was going to divide us for good, because I was right: if I hadn’t been here, he would have been siding with his own species. Maybe if we’d been a species of starfaring snake people, he would have been too consumed by professional curiosity to think about what it meant to turn his back on humanity, but we weren’t. We were green and growing and not something that had ever interested him, except in the sense that we were me and I was the love of his life. Supposedly. Was that going to be enough?

For the first time, I honestly didn’t know.

“Look,” breathed Jeff, voice filled with awe. I craned my neck to see around him to the window.

Streaks of light were cutting across the sky, too big and close to be shooting stars, too controlled in their descents to be meteors. One of them impacted in the far desert, sending a bright ring of molten sand splashing upward against the night. It was beautiful. It was the sort of moment that would have sold a million copies of National Geographic, if there had been a photographer quick enough and fortunate enough to capture it. It was eclipsed almost immediately, as three more streaks of light cut through the sky above it, heading for their own landing sites.

“It’s started,” said Tahlia. There was no hiding the joy, or the relief, in her voice. I shared it. We weren’t safe here anymore. We had never been truly safe here. We’d been sheltered by the assumption that we were just like everyone else, that our claims of an alien origin had been comical at best and delusional at worst. Once those assumptions had started to crumble, so had the pretense of our safety.