Agent Brown shouted something to the men under her command, and it was a relief to realize I couldn’t hear her over the rush of the wind and the roar of the engine powering down. Then she turned to look at the collapsed terminal, and relief became terror, hot and twisting in the pit of my stomach. She knew we were here. Maybe not us in specific, but she knew someone was here—someone who’d either evaded the scout ship, or come to meet it.

“We need to go,” I whispered, lowering my hand.

Toni looked to Mandy. “Here’s your chance,” she said. “Last stop before the end of the line. You want to run? You do it now, or you do it never.”

Mandy bit the corner of her lip, pulling her mouth into the worried pout I’d seen so many times before, usually when she was bent over her sewing machine, struggling to bring her dreams to life. Finally, regretfully, she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I can’t … No. I can’t run. I should have run a long time ago, and doing it now would be … would be refusing to accept the consequences of my own actions. Lucas wouldn’t be proud of me for doing that. Robert wouldn’t be proud of me.” Her voice broke on the name of her dead boyfriend. Her eyes were full of tears when she looked at me again.

“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.