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.

Graham walked into view, heading unerringly for my phone. David and Toni were close behind him, Toni hanging limply off David’s arm. Her eyes were closed. She looked like she was about to be sick. Fleeing into the forest like this must have been virtually impossible for her. She’d done it anyway. My instincts about the police must have been correct.

Pulling my phone from beneath the layer of leaves, Graham straightened and looked around himself in a slow circle, scanning the trees—first at ground level, then higher up, like he thought I might have decided to hide by fleeing straight up.