Above that: Anastasia Miller. You’re the only one I’ve found who made national news when you sprouted. Did you have to go and snatch a toddler? Well done. If the whole invasion is like you, we’re screwed.

Quickly, with shaking hands, I swiped my thumbs in the patterns the screen would recognize as words, asking, Who is this?

The reply came only a few seconds later, so fast that it almost seemed like it must have been keyed in before I could even ask.

You know who this is.

Then: We met in the forest.

Then: I work w/computers. Finding your number was easy.

Then: You should have hid better.

Slowly, I let my phone drop to my lap and stared at the wall, my mouth working although no sound came out. Jeff. Jeff, from the forest; Jeff, with the bandage on his cheek and the alien impossibility beneath it.

Jeff, who I’d never met when I was awake: who might as well have existed only in my dreams, until he somehow found my phone number and decided to exist when I was awake, too. Jeff, who walked under the same trees I did, who looked upward and strained to see the same elusive sky.

If Graham hadn’t been the one to pull me out of the shower, I might have thought Jeff’s texts were an illusion, something I’d invented to alleviate my concerns about going to the observatory. But they weren’t. They were real, and Jeff was real, and this was it: the proof I’d been seeking for so long. I didn’t need to hear the signal to know the aliens were real. I could simply point to the man who walked, impossibly, in my dreams, and say, “See? If he’s real, I’m real, and if I’m real, you need to listen to me.”

Not that it would prove anything to people who didn’t want it to. Jeff could be someone I’d met online, or a fellow liar, or any one of a dozen things, none of which said “alien” to the average skeptic.

My phone buzzed again. I looked down.

You there?

He wasn’t going to stop. If I was being honest, I couldn’t blame him. I’d been trying to find proof of what I was for most of my life, and I had to assume he’d been doing the same, fighting to find his footing in a world that didn’t want to allow for children to be snatched away and replaced by their own alien counterparts. We were the changelings of the science fiction age, and that made us both terrifying and untrue. Jeff had to be as frustrated as I was by the way he’d been forced to conceal himself, trapped in a world full of humans who never wanted to believe him.

Can’t talk now, I typed hurriedly. Going to observatory.