I wasn’t sure whether my visibility made me a better scout or a worse one. It definitely made me worse at infiltration, since there had never been a hope in hell that I’d be able to stay hidden. But I kept smiling politely at the guards, while the bloodhound continued to strain toward me, nose quivering, bloodshot eyes locked on my body.

“Barooo,” it said again, sounding as annoyed as was possible for a dog. It had found what it wanted, and it wasn’t being allowed to catch it, or being told what a good hound it was for doing the spotting.

I was okay with that, since what it wanted was me, and I didn’t know why, or what it would do if it got me. My hands were tingling, a clear response to stress. Was this how I found out for sure I wasn’t human? In an airport security room, with a trained dog trying to—

Wait. “What does that dog do?” I asked, suddenly frowning. “Is it an alien-sniffing dog? Do you have an alien-sniffing dog? That doesn’t make sense. Nobody even knows what the aliens would look like. How would we know what the aliens smell like? I think this is a stunt. I think you’re trying to … I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you’re trying to do it to us, right now.” I stopped smiling and started glaring.

“Take him out of here,” snapped the guard. The bloodhound’s handler wrestled the dog back under control before dragging him back out the door. The third guard, the one with neither tablet nor dog, remained where he was, standing at the soft slouch that seems to serve the TSA as attention.

The guard with the tablet returned her gaze to me and Graham. “Were you aware that there are, presently, fifteen thousand American citizens who claim to come from another planet?”

“No,” I admitted. Given the size of the US population, the number seemed refreshingly low, like it could also be the number of ambidextrous natural redheads with heterochromia and lactose intolerance. If I were the government, I wouldn’t have been worried about the resident extraterrestrials at all. I would have been worried about the ones now coming in my direction.

“Further, were you aware that one-third of those individuals regularly utilize air travel services?”

“Everyone takes a plane to get where they need to go, when where they need to go is far away,” I said.

The guard’s eyes narrowed. “Not everyone claims to be extraterrestrial in origin.”

“Wait,” said Graham. “Are you saying this is all … what, the TSA equivalent of an improv show? You use a trained dog to make us think you can pick up something strange about us, and then you try to get us to admit to doing something wrong? We’re about to do something wrong. We’re about to miss our flight.”