I pulled my phone out of my pocket, nearly dropping it in the loam as I fumbled to bring up the main screen. Once there, I swiped on Graham’s number and brought the phone to my ear, counting anxiously down from ten until—

“Hello? Stasia? Where are you?”

“In the woods across the parking lot,” I said hurriedly. “Graham, you have to get out of there.”

“I’m in the lobby. Looking for you.”

“The police are coming!”

There was a split second of frozen silence. Then Graham snapped, “Turn your crowd beacon on and stay exactly where you are.” He hung up.

I lowered my phone, gaping at it in horror before bringing up my app list and activating the crowd beacon. It had been designed for public places like amusement parks and shopping malls. When it was on, anyone who had your specific key could use it to find you. Since it wasn’t on by default, like some of the kid trackers, it wasn’t so much an invasion of privacy as it was a way to keep the party from being split. Better yet, the security locks on a crowd beacon were proprietary and couldn’t be used by law enforcement—despite several lawsuits that had tried to change that. If the police turned on a wide-band signal detector, they’d be able to follow my phone into the woods, but without a warrant or an unethical computer technician, they wouldn’t know it was mine, just that it was there.

And despite that, I carefully set my phone on a nearby stump, covering it with a handful of fallen leaves, before retreating behind a thick-trunked tree. Better safe than sorry. Better out of sight than presenting a clear target.

Hunching down slightly to make myself seem even smaller, I waited.

Seconds slid by, blossoming into minutes, until I began to fear we’d been too late: whatever instinct had told me the police didn’t mean Graham any good had come too late, and he had been taken, arrested and carried off to tell them everything he knew about the alien signal. It didn’t matter if what he knew was best categorized as “not much”: he was a scientist, he’d traveled across the country to listen to the raw data, he was a threat. People were scared. They were looking for something to point at and say, “That, right there, is the enemy.” Graham would work well enough.

Humans love having an easy bad guy. Plant people from outer space, that’s hard. Someone who was conspiring with them somehow, but was otherwise entirely human and comprehensible? Now that was a bad guy to believe in.

Someone was walking through the woods. More than one someone, if I could believe what I heard. I drew farther back behind my tree, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.