“You’re about to ask me to run again if I think things are getting dangerous, because you love me and you have thoughts in your head that you don’t want there, which means—knowing you—that you’re afraid you’re going to do something to hurt me. And I won’t do it. I ran away once, because it seemed like I could still get the others out. I was always going to come back to you. You would have been sitting in your alien stronghold—which would look like something out of a bad science fiction movie, by the way, and everyone would be wearing silver bikinis—and there’d be a knock on your unbreakable door, and it would be this ginger herpetologist with a suitcase asking if Stasia was home. You can’t get rid of me. I’m like a novel fungal infection picked up in a polluted swamp. Once I’m under your skin, all the creams in the world won’t clear me up.”

I barked surprised laughter into the night air, earning myself glances from all directions. Mandy looked pleased. Toni and David looked amused. Jeff and Lucas, who might never agree on anything else, looked annoyed. That struck me as even funnier than the image of our vegetable castle, and I laughed again, harder this time.

Graham squeezed my hand, pulling my attention back to him. “You’re never getting rid of me, Anastasia Miller,” he said. “From here to the end, you’re never getting rid of me. The sooner you come to terms with that, the happier you’re going to be.”

“That sounds almost like a threat.”

“You tell me, Miss Alien Invasion.”

I was opening my mouth to reply, feeling better than I had in days—we were bantering, we were flirting, everything was going to be okay—when the roar of an ATV engine slashed across the night, going from faint to screaming in only a few seconds. I whipped around, still holding Graham’s hand, looking for the source of the sound. All around me, the others did the same, falling into an automatic circle as we got our backs to one another. We were still capable of standing together in the face of outside danger. That should have felt like a good thing.

In the moment, I wasn’t feeling anything but terror. We had no weapons and no vehicle; whatever came, it was going to catch us.

Lights crested the nearest hill. One pair, then two more, then another six, until nine ATVs were roaring toward us, their drivers shadows against the greater night. I raised my free hand to shield my eyes against the glare of their headlights as our circle tightened, our shoulders bumping together as we struggled to hold our formation.