I turned around, facing the sounds of pursuit. I offered Mandy my free hand, and after a moment of hesitation, she took it. The three of us stayed where we were, waiting.

It wasn’t a long wait. Agent Brown charged into view, her people behind her, and drew up short at the sight of us. For a moment, no one spoke. Then, finally, she sighed.

“Fuck,” she said. I realized her makeup, always impeccable before, was virtually nonexistent; only a thin line of eyeliner had been applied to her upper lid. That might have seemed like a small thing, but she was a woman who’d survived in government long enough to find herself with a team and a title. Frustrating as it was, that meant she would have been paying attention to her appearance for her entire life, never allowing it to be one more stumbling block on the path to success.

For a career agent to be outside with so little makeup … things were crumbling in a way I should probably have predicted but somehow hadn’t been prepared for. The human rules were falling away, and what was left was animal, and panicked, and ready to bite.

“I should have known it would be you,” she continued, her voice tired and filled with resignation. “An estimated two hundred thousand of you assholes on Earth, and it was always going to be you.”

“I guess that’s true,” I said. “Take me to your leader.”

3.

Seattle had burned and Portland was, according to the NASA agents and their grunting answers to Graham’s questions, a smoking crater; we were heading farther up the coast than I had expected, all the way to Vancouver, BC.

“There were more aliens in the United States than Canada,” Agent Brown had said, weariness in her voice and a studied disaffection in her eyes. She was working so hard not to grab me and throw me out of the tiny commuter jet that had collected us all from the last working runway at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. She wanted to seem like a professional, like she was still somehow above it all, and I couldn’t blame her for that. We all had our own ways of coping in this changing, terrible new world.

“Oh,” I said blankly.

She sighed, rolling her eyes in a way that would have been almost comical, if we hadn’t been crammed into a too-small plane while men with guns stood watch, waiting for us to move a muscle in a way they didn’t like. “The Canadian government had a much easier time rounding up and removing their alien population. Which means the invaders now attempting to make headway there have less knowledge of the local area. Who would have thought a lower population density would be the thing that saved them?”

“Well, that and bears,” said Graham. “I always wanted to see an alien invasion try to deal with bears.”