Exposed, the skin of her arms was paler than the skin on her hands and face, as if it had never seen the sun. Even so, I could see the thin web of scars that covered her from fingertip to bicep, extending up to where her shirt still covered her shoulders. It was like someone had used a tattoo gun filled with white ink to draw a grid, freehand, on her body. The lines weren’t straight. They curled and twisted from point to point, creating an unpredictable mesh that would have been virtually impossible to escape.

“I could strip, but this should give you the idea,” said Toni, and her voice was ice and ashes.

“I don’t—” I looked away from her skin, focusing on her eyes, and was momentarily struck silent by the hatred in her face. She looked like she would have happily set me on fire, just to see how long it would take for me to burn.

Was this how everyone was going to look at me, once they realized that I’d been telling the truth all along? Mandy and Graham believed me, but they believed me mostly because it didn’t hurt them. The invasion was going to hurt people. I knew that, as surely as I knew that it was coming—and that I needed to hear that signal.

“What happened to you?” I whispered, finally finding my voice.

Toni’s smile was like a razor.

“I tried to pick a flower,” she said.

My mouth went dry.

2.

“My father owns a summer home on one of the little islands off the coast,” she said, eyes on me. I might as well have been the only other person in the room. Someone from the wall was finally here to listen to her story—and no matter how many times she’d told it, I got the feeling that until someone like me heard it, none of those tellings would really count. Not to her. “We used to go every year, until I had my accident.”

I said nothing. Neither did Graham. David, who had clearly heard this all before, remained beside her, setting one heavy hand on her shoulder, like he could keep her from floating away if he held on tightly enough.

“I was eight. I used to live in the woods. I was planning to go to work for the National Forest Service. Daddy used to joke that he’d wind up buying me half of the Appalachian Mountains for a birthday present, and I always said it would be a great gift, because I wanted to keep them safe and protected. I’d been hiking around our summer home since I was six. They kept a close eye on me the first summer, and not such a close eye the second summer, and by the third summer they trusted me enough to let me go wherever I wanted, as long as I made it home by sundown.”