The only bad thing he’d ever done to me was Roxanna. She wasn’t a coworker, but she was a colleague, and he’d been the one who urged her to go to Burning Man, just to try it out. Without him, Lucas might have found a girlfriend I was less inclined to drown in the nearest body of standing water.

Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.

“How are you holding up?” he asked. “Is it … you know?”

“I’m okay.” I shrugged. “A little shaken, I guess? I’m having to ask myself a lot of questions. I don’t know that I’m going to like all the answers I get. But I’m okay.”

Graham looked at me oddly. “You didn’t answer my second question.”

“I need you to come home.”

It was the sort of bald, needy declaration that rarely arose between us. Graham blinked, looking nonplussed. Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess you answered it after all. Is tomorrow soon enough?”

“It should be,” I said. “Is it going to be a problem?”

His laugh was unsteady. “Honestly, no. A few of my teammates have asked about you. They wanted me to find out whether you recognized the signal.”

Graham has never questioned whether or not I’m what I claim to be. If Mandy chose to believe me because it didn’t hurt anything for her to do so, Graham chose to believe me because he didn’t think I’d lie to him. That meant he’d known what he was doing the first time he’d invited me to one of his company get-togethers, and hadn’t been bothered in the slightest when I had introduced myself to all of them as the vanguard of an invasion. They were computer people, and scientists, and that meant that for the most part, they were exceptionally tolerant of strangeness.

I think some of them actually hoped for proof of my extraterrestrial nature, since it would give them a leg up on the competition. No better way to win the software wars than to be the first to press into the rest of the galaxy.

“Oh,” I said, and laughed unsteadily.

Graham went still. He leaned closer. “Stasia,” he said, “did you recognize the signal?”

I didn’t trust my voice. I bit my lip and nodded, trusting his knowledge of my expressions to make my meaning clear.

Graham’s eyes widened. “Wow,” he said. “So this is … You think it’s real? It’s not some sort of hoax?”

“I don’t know this Dr. Vornholt,” I said.

“No one knows him,” said Graham. “I’ve been calling in favors all morning, and nobody has any idea who he is.”

“Then how—”

“Did he get access to the equipment he’d need to pick up this signal? No idea. I think we may be dealing with someone publishing under a fake name.”