“If you were going to do this, if you were going to invade and kill us all and make us all into monsters in your own image, why couldn’t you have done it before he died?” she asked. There was no venom in her voice, only a quiet, shattered resignation that hurt more than any malice could have done. “Why did you have to do this when it meant I was going to be alone? Why couldn’t you hurry?”

“I didn’t—I mean, they never asked me,” I said haltingly. “I didn’t get to decide when the invasion was going to come. I had to wait just like you did.”

“Not quite like we did, but point taken,” said Toni. “Look, this is fun and all, and honestly, I do enjoy a good friendship fight, but if we don’t want to go back to NASA’s holding cells, we need to move. Shall we move?”

We moved.

Running through the broken terminal was like something out of a nightmare. Chunks of masonry and shattered glass littered the floors, making even the easiest path an obstacle course. We followed the signs that pointed toward baggage claim, hoping they would guide us to the front of the airport, where we could presumably escape into the maze of parking garages. There might even be a car out there that Mandy could figure out how to hijack, especially with Jeff to help her. Modern vehicles relied way too much on computers to keep someone with his skill level out.

Behind us, far behind us for the moment, but they would catch up soon enough, we could hear the crunching and smashing sounds of Agent Brown’s team making their way into the airport. They had equipment. They had preparation. I could hope they also had some sort of report telling them the terminal was too damaged to search thoroughly: pulling the ceiling down on ourselves, while anticlimactic, seemed like a better fate than going back to an unmarked observation cell.

“This was your idea,” hissed Jeff, running past me.

I didn’t argue. I was the one who’d wanted to come back to Earth. I was the one who’d wanted to be here for the discussion with the planet’s leaders, to make them truly understand what was about to happen, and that it had been inevitable from the moment our seeds streaked across their sky. I was—

I was the one running when the representatives of those leaders were following after me. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the scout ship had touched down in my home state, tempting me with one last look at the mountains that had been my anchor for my entire life. And it couldn’t a coincidence that Agent Brown was here, either.

First was testing us. First was testing me. I was her daughter, and she needed to know how I would behave under pressure.

I stopped running.