Her eyes narrowed. “So you can kill the president?”

“So I can offer a ceasefire,” I said. “Don’t you want this all to stop?”

“I do. And it seems like I’ve been offered a way to make that happen. Bargaining chips beyond price. Humans who’ve seen the alien armada and lived to tell the tale.” She cast a thin smile at my companions, then nodded sharply toward me. “Now,” she said.

Hands grabbed my shoulders, horrifyingly reminiscent of the last time I’d been on a plane with this woman and her thugs. They dragged me from my seat as more of her people moved to hold Mandy and Graham down. Both of them were shouting, fighting to break loose and come after me. I was grateful as hell for that. If I was about to die, I wanted the last thing I saw to be the people who cared about me.

A loud roaring noise came from behind me, and I knew even without looking that they’d opened one of the plane’s emergency exits. This was it, then: this was how I ended, even as it had been how I began.

I was going to fall out of the sky.

I didn’t scream. Didn’t fight or kick or do anything else that might lead to one of those guns going off and endangering the people around me. I didn’t care about Agent Brown or her people, but Graham? Mandy? If I did anything right in this life, it was going to be protecting them.

Then those same strong hands that had grabbed me were shoving me forward, through a gap in the wall of the world, and I was falling. Forever. I was falling.

I was never going to come to land.

Chapter 20

Somewhere over Washington State: August 17, 2031

Invasion nearing its conclusion

1.

The wind whipped around me, icy cold and unforgiving. If there had been any human skin left clinging to my body, the wind would have had it off in a second, leaving me to plummet undisguised and whole toward the distant, waiting world.

From this far up, there didn’t seem to be any cities, no highways or houses or other signs of mankind’s dominion. There was only the green, endless green stretching on as far as the eye could see, like a promise of a world reborn. A world after the invasion, when the garden would be free to grow again, providing a home to whatever came next. Maybe they would be better, the inheritors of Earth. Maybe when our seeds fell from the sky again, and their own children came to them claiming to be the edge of an invasion, they would answer the request with pleas for peace. It could happen. In a universe where body-stealing plants from space were the greatest threat anyone had ever known, it could happen.