“I put down roots,” I said. My mother had asked me the same question, on one of the rare occasions when my mother had asked me a question at all. We had fallen out of the habit of questioning each other, somewhere between my disappearance and my insistence that I was my own person and that person was not a human being.

“I see.” The guard lowered her tablet. “What is your interest in the alien signal?”

I could feel Graham watching me. Not hoping I would keep my mouth shut—he’d never asked me to lie about my convictions, even as he’d asked me to please tell him if I ever decided I wanted to be human again, to be helped through whatever made me abandon my humanity as a bad dream—but waiting to hear what I was going to say, and how much trouble I was going to get us into.

Smiling my biggest, sweetest smile, I said, “Well, I’m from Mars, see, and I wanted to listen to the signal without any Earth tech in the way, so I could figure out if it was our neighbors, the Jovians, trying to make first contact before we could.”

The guard frowned. “The Jovians would be…?”

“Oh, they’re from Jupiter. They’re sort of big jellyfish with tendrils a mile long and terrible breath.” I fanned the air exaggeratedly. “You don’t want to make first contact with them. They’re big jerks.”

“Is there a problem?” asked Graham. “I didn’t think flying while alien was against the law. Since up until a week ago, most people thought aliens didn’t exist.”

“Anastasia Miller, age thirty-five,” said the guard again, more disgusted this time. “According to our files, you have been claiming to be extraterrestrial in origin since you were three years old. That’s rather unusual for a child, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” I said. “Children don’t distinguish fantasy from reality the way adults do. I’ve known children who said they were monsters, that they were ghosts wearing new skins, that they were going to devour everyone they loved—and those are the well-adjusted ones. For a child to say ‘I’m an alien’ is perfectly normal.”

“What about for an adult?”

“I can’t speak for everyone,” I said, with a shrug. “In my case, I’m pretty stubborn. The more people told me I couldn’t be an alien, the more I insisted, and eventually it just stuck.” Eventually, it had been picked up by the tabloids and the gossip blogs looking to follow up on the mystery of the disappearing, reappearing child. Various alien-encounter groups had invited me to appear before them as a guest, starting literally on the day I’d turned eighteen and been able to legally insist on receiving my own mail.