We turned. There, wearing a slightly stained white coat over her coveralls, was our driver, earmuffs still clamped firmly over her ears. Her hair was a frizzy corona of white-blonde strands, standing out in all directions like it was doing its best impression of a halo. She had her hands shoved into her pockets and was rocking back onto her heels, looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

I met her eyes for the first time, and flinched. I knew her. I’d never seen her before, but I knew her, the same way I knew my own reflection. Something about her made the air electric, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end in instinctive warning. I wanted to grab Graham and run.

I stayed right where I was.

“I mean, yeah, if you really wanted to meet Anthony Fabris,” said the driver. Tilting her head, she continued philosophically, “Meeting fictional characters has always been difficult without the aid of psychotropic substances.”

“Toni,” hissed David.

“It’s cool,” she said, and fixed her eyes on me. “I knew one of them would show up to see the data. I mean, it was inevitable, fictional characters or no. I sort of expected it to be one of the closer ones, or maybe one of the Canadians. Like Rick Patton from Toronto. Did you know he still does his little internet advice show? ‘Plant Person Pointers,’ it’s called. Guy is gonzo for alliteration.”

Something about her unwavering gaze made me want to squirm, and made the itch inside my elbow even stronger. I pressed my palm down against it, hard, trying to compress the sensation away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to stop looking at her. My eyes refused to focus on anything else.

“No one ever does,” said the woman—Toni—with a shrug. Her eyes were that terrible shade of blue that seems almost white as it moves toward the pupil, like it swallowed so much light that there was no possible way she could have seen with any clarity.

“I’m sorry,” said Graham. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Antonia Fabris,” said the woman. She smiled, sudden and gregarious, and was the chatty driver who’d carried us here from our hotel once more. “I caught the signal out of space, because I’ve been listening for it for a long, long time. And now I’ve caught you. I assume you’re here because you wanted to get a look at the raw data and convince yourselves it had been fiddled with and there isn’t really an alien armada on the way? Anyway, you should follow me.”

She turned then, walking briskly across the lobby and down a narrow hallway on the other side. David cleared his throat nervously.