Dragging Graham while Jeff half-carried a squirming Mandy, we made for the nearest remaining airport structure. It looked like it had been a terminal once, before it had been picked up and dropped back down from some ridiculous height. Now it was a playground of exposed girders and piled concrete, with a strip of carpeted floor visible through a gaping hole in the wall, slanting at an extreme angle. Climbing inside there would be just this side of stupid. Could alien plant people get tetanus? Was I really in that much of a hurry to find out one way or the other?

“Stop fighting, or I will smash your head against a girder and see whether the fear of discovery outweighs the desire to drink your blood,” said Jeff, in a low, menacing tone.

Mandy stopped squirming and began pummeling him with her fists, shouting in a vicious mishmash of Spanish and English profanity. That was, bizarrely, a good sign: when we’d been in school, Mandy had reserved her theatrical displays of temper for the moments immediately prior to giving up. “Everyone expects me to lose it once in a while” had been her justification. “This way, they get what they want, and I don’t look like a sap for giving up.”

If she was yelling, she was tiring, and if she was tiring, she was going to stop fighting soon. That was good. That was possibly the only thing left that might save us.

The chopper was still closing, looking for a block of concrete smooth enough to support its weight. We reached the edge of the collapsed terminal and began to climb, our hands scrabbling for purchase, our feet kicking loose small chunks of concrete. Jeff all but threw Mandy halfway up the pile before beginning to climb after her. Mandy, to her vague credit, didn’t try to climb back down. She reached the top before any of us, and when I reached up, her hand was there to catch mine and pull me to my feet.

“Sorry,” she said, voice low and almost ashamed. “I don’t know what came over me back there.”

“You’re okay,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her, trying to focus past the delicious animal smell of her flesh and focus, instead, on the Mandy of her, the mix of talcum powder and aggressively sharp chemical perfume that had always defined my friend. It had been long enough that those things were almost faded, washed away by running and the road, but I could find the edges of them, if I looked long enough. “We’re okay.”

“No.” She pushed me away, looking at me solemnly. “We’re not. We’re never going to be okay again.”

My face fell. “I don’t…”

“I love you. You’re my friend, and I love you, and you never lied to me. You were there when Robert died, you never tried to tell me it would all be okay or that he’d want me to move on, you let me break dishes and scream, and I love you, and we are not okay. You came from outer space to wipe out my fucking species.”