“Hunter likes you too,” I translated. Turning back to the vice-president and her guards, I asked, “So are you it? Is this what remains of the United States government? Do you even have any power here? We’re in Canada. Doesn’t that make your presence politically fraught?”

“Cities are burning. People are dying. People are being abducted into alien vessels. No one has heard anything out of North Korea or Ireland in over a week. We’re losing touch with other areas daily. At this point, national borders seem less important than the safety of our species.”

“Right,” I said. “The president and prime minister took a vote and decided you were the expendable one, didn’t they?”

Vice-President Rogers’s cheeks flared red. Aloud, she said only, “I’m less essential to the function of the government than they are. I am proud to serve at the pleasure of the president.”

“Right,” I said. Graham was close to me, so close I could feel the heat coming off his skin, and Mandy was only a little farther away, watching warily. Agent Brown and her goons were behind us, but they didn’t frighten me anymore. They had no dangers left to offer.

There was a soft boom from somewhere far overhead, like something had entered our atmosphere with far more caution and control than the average meteor. I kept my eyes on the vice-president.

“We are not the diplomatic team,” I said quietly. “We are two aliens and two humans, three of whom grew up on this planet, all of whom would like to see this invasion end as quickly and cleanly as possible.”

“So you’re going to leave our planet and never come back,” said Vice-President Rogers.

“I think you and I both know that it’s way too late for that to happen,” I said regretfully—and I was genuinely sorry. Looking back, I could see all the places where humanity might have steered away from this result. If they had listened to their own children when we started claiming to be the vanguard of an invasion; if they had greeted the first proof that aliens were real with something other than fear …

It felt like I was justifying things to myself, and in a very real way, I was. If it had been up to me, the invasion would never have happened; would have been a few scout ships setting down and quietly collecting the people like me, the ones whose hearts beat with the tempo of another planet’s tides. They would have carried us, and our loved ones, away to the stars, and Earth would have been poorer by a few thousand people, but not at the center of a war. If it had been up to me, we would never have made this world a garden.