Graham’s smile slowly dissolved into a cautious frown. “You got a bad feeling?”

“I want you to stay near me until this is over. Whatever it is.”

Whatever it was, it was going to get worse before it got better … and “better” was still very much in the eye of the beholder.

“Come home,” I repeated.

Graham hesitated before he nodded.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Chapter 4

Seattle, Washington: July 19, 2031

Nineteen days pre-invasion

1.

The airport arrivals gate was surprisingly empty. According to Mandy and her hawkish passion for the news, air travel had dropped almost thirty percent since the alien signal was intercepted. People had already started canceling nonessential travel, saying they’d changed their plans, when they’d really stopped wanting to leave the ground.

The alien signal had been ripped apart and put back together by every research institute and think tank in the world, with at least half openly releasing their findings to the public, and some members of the remaining half finding ways to quietly leak their own findings. So far, no one had managed to discredit the thing. If anything, they were proving it more and more conclusively, finding tiny artifacts that spoke to an utterly inhuman method of constructing and compressing the signal.

People were still hoping the alien visitors would be coming in peace, but they were keeping their feet on the ground until they knew one way or another. Fear is a powerful motivator when it comes to that sort of thing.

Passengers began trickling through the gate. I bounced up onto my toes, earning a sour look from the woman next to me, and waved wildly at a short, disheveled man in khakis. Graham paused, face blank, before slowly grinning and trotting toward me. Not running—running in an airport is a good way to attract the attention of the TSA, and no one enjoys that—but moving fast, wasting no time.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me off the ground. I squeaked. Then he was kissing me, whiskers rough against my skin, and for a moment I focused on that to the exclusion of anything else. Graham was here. I was here. The world was changing, but it had not yet changed enough to make a moment like this one impossible, no matter how improbable it might one day seem.

The kiss ended. Graham grinned, close enough that I could see the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I reached out and pressed the tip of one finger against the web of lines.

“When did we get so old?” I asked.

He laughed and put me down. “That’s what you ask? Not ‘How was your flight’ or ‘Did you want to grab something to eat before we go back through security,’ but ‘When did we get so old’? Are you having some kind of existential crisis on me here?”