“You’re going to get this every time you fly for the rest of your life,” she said. “We’re not alone anymore. Until we can know for sure that you’re one of us, and not one of them, you’re going to get this. Because we don’t know what they look like. We don’t know where they come from. And we don’t know what they want.” Her smile was abrupt and startling in its ferocity.

“Have a nice flight,” she said, and turned and left the room, leaving us alone with the third guard, who moved to start the X-ray belt. Graham and I exchanged a look before we put our bags down. We wanted to object. We wanted to argue. We needed to fly.

The plane wasn’t going to wait for us, and after this—after all of this—I didn’t want to count on being able to catch a later flight. The invasion might not even have time to start. More and more, I was starting to feel like humanity was going to tear itself apart without our help.

3.

The drink service was finished, and most of the plane had settled down to read or nap or drink their tiny glasses of overpriced scotch. The seat-back entertainment centers were on all around us. About half of them were playing movies, recent blockbuster fare edited for content to make them safe for peeping tots who might be seated in the next row over. The other half …

“All these people are watching the news,” I said quietly, bending my head so that I was talking only to Graham and not to the people around us. The ongoing roar of the airplane’s engines made privacy easier to find, even as I couldn’t shake the conviction that we were still being watched. “Did something happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, voice pitched equally low. “Do you want me to turn it on?”

It wasn’t going to be safe to be on an airplane once our ships arrived: I knew that, with that quiet conviction that was always with me, the conviction from which all the facts and feelings about my species of origin arose. When we took the skies, we weren’t going to share them anymore, and we weren’t going to be checking passenger lists for our implanted scouts. My own people would strike me down as easily as they would slaughter every human in this floating metal box, and they wouldn’t grieve for me after it was done, because a few deaths were the cost of doing business on a galactic scale.