It took a few seconds for the others to realize I was no longer alongside them. They stopped, staring at me, Mandy and Graham with concern, Jeff with disdain, and Toni with grudging respect.

“We came back because it’s time for our leaders to speak to the planetary government,” I said. “I came back to be part of that conversation. The rest of you can keep running if you want to. I would want to, if this hadn’t been my idea. But I have to stay. I have to talk to them.”

Panic was such an easy habit to fall into. Fear was its own kind of drug, intoxicating, all-consuming. It wasn’t pleasant, but there was something tempting about it all the same. As long as we were afraid, as long as we were panicking, we didn’t have to think about while we were doing. All we had to do was run, rabbit, run for the horizon, and let the future sort itself out while we weren’t looking. How could anyone be expected to resist that sort of temptation?

“Then I’m staying too,” said Graham, and turned, walking back across the broken floor to me.

I frowned. “They’re going to see you as a traitor. They’re going to think you’re siding against your own species.”

“I’m not,” he said, and took my hand. “If I could figure out how to make this stop, I would do it. I would tell the ships to go back to space and take everything they’ve brought with them, and then I would hold on to you and refuse to let go until they loaded me along with everything else. But I can’t do that. So all I can do is hold on to you, for as long as I possibly can. All I can do is refuse to let you go alone.”

“Well, if that isn’t so romantic I could puke, I don’t know what is.” Toni shook her head. “I’m running. I want to make it back to the ship in one piece. David is too stupid to be left alone for very long.”

There were a lot of words I could have used to describe David. “Stupid” wasn’t one of them. There was something in Toni’s eyes that told me not to argue. She didn’t know how to express her feelings easily. She never had. Whether that was part of who she was, or some lingering damage from what our flower had done to her, she used the language she had, and the language she had was spite and scorn and obfuscation.

“Jeff, go with her,” I said. “Make sure no one else decides she would make a good Slurpee before we can get back to the ship. Mandy?”

She bit her lip, clearly torn between staying with the people she knew and getting safely away from everything that was potentially about to go wrong. Finally, in a soft voice, she said, “If there’s a chance they’re going to put you on television, you should have somebody with you who knows how to do your hair,” and began picking her way through the debris to stand at my other side.