Once we were safely rolling along, passing houses and rickety gas stations, he glanced at me sidelong and said, in a low voice, “I wasn’t sure you were really real.”

“You texted me.”

“I could have been texting … anybody. You could have been literally anybody. But you’re you. You’re the girl from the forest, and you’re real and here and in my van.” His cheeks turned red, the skin around the bandage showing its color patchily, like something was interfering with the blood flow. “I’ve never met anyone like us before.”

“Like us?”

“You know … us.” He glanced at the rearview mirror. The van was partitioned inside, with the passengers sharing bench seats that put them too far from the driver for reasonable conversation. I got the feeling that wasn’t an accident. He didn’t want them involved in this moment. He didn’t want them anywhere near him—or near me. Given a choice, he wouldn’t have let them in the car. He would have just left them in the woods and driven away.

I thought of Toni’s wall of pictures, of the labels reading DECEASED and the calm way she’d talked about the mortality rate among people like the two of us, and I couldn’t blame him. I might want to, but I couldn’t do it.

“Oh,” I said softly. Then: “Neither have I. Before I saw you in the forest, I wasn’t even sure there were others.”

Jeff scoffed. “Of course there are others. That’s how plants work. They drop a million seeds and hope one or two will sprout.”

“Not a million,” I said, unable to stifle the slow twisting feeling in my stomach. Not a million, no, but the logic was sound. What was the point in an invasion that started with only one spy?

Even before I’d seen Jeff—even before I’d seen Toni’s wall—I should have known there would be dozens of us, hundreds, maybe even thousands, scattered all around the world. Because kids die. Not many kids, not even most kids, but still, kids die. They run into traffic or they eat the wrong thing or they catch COVID or the wrong strain of flu. An invasion that could lose whatever advantage we represented because of a bad hamburger was no invasion at all. It was a farce masquerading as a threat, and there was no point to it.

“Not a million,” Jeff agreed. “Still. Lots of us, and I never managed to meet a single one before you flew close enough to my house for me to pick you up. You’re real. You’re real, and that means I’m real, and that means I’m not…” He touched the bandage on his cheek, eyes troubled.

“It means I’m not broken,” he said finally.

“No,” I said softly, and looked out the window at the wooded roadside rolling endlessly by. The trees seemed to go on forever. Maine was a lot like Washington, at least in that way.