“This is not optional,” she said to my back.

“Seems optional to me!” I waved goodbye.

Yeah. It wasn’t optional.

When I got back to my apartment, before I even got to my front door, four well-dressed men surrounded me. They showed me their FBI badges and hustled me into one of three black SUVs parked in the complex parking lot. After a twenty-minute drive where they refused to answer any of my questions or even speak to me at all, they parked and showed me into a generic-looking business-park building.

My feet barely touched the ground as they led me down an empty hallway with unmarked doors every 30 feet or so. Finally, they opened a set of double doors at the end of the hall and gently nudged me inside.

Unlike the rest of the abandoned building, this room was full of furniture and shiny, high-tech devices. It was the most well-stocked biology lab I’d ever seen. And right in the middle of it all was Eva Stratt.

“Hello, Dr. Grace,” she said. “This is your new lab.”

The FBI agents closed the doors behind me, leaving Stratt and me alone in the lab. I rubbed my shoulder where they had manhandled me a little too hard.

I looked at the door behind me. “So… when you say ‘a certain amount of authority’…”

“I have all of the authority.”

“You have an accent. Are you even from America?”

“I’m Dutch. I was an administrator at ESA. But that doesn’t matter. Now I’m in charge of this. There is no time for slow, international committees. The sun is dying. We need a solution. It’s my job to find it.”

She pulled up a lab stool and sat down. “These ‘dots’ are probably a life-form. The exponential progression of solar dimming is consistent with the exponential population growth of a typical life-form.”

“You think they’re… eating the sun?”

“They’re eating its energy output at least,” she said.

“Okay, that’s—well, terrifying. But regardless: What the heck do you want from me?”

“The ArcLight probe is bringing the samples back to Earth. Some of them might still be alive. I want you to examine them and find out what you can.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that earlier,” I said. “But I have to believe there are more qualified people to do this than just me.”

“Scientists all over the world will be looking at them, but I want you to be the first.”

“Why?”

“It lives on or near the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life-form to you?”

She was right. Water simply can’t exist at those temperatures. After about 3,000 degrees Celsius, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms can’t stay bound to each other anymore. The surface of the sun was 5,500 degrees Celsius.

She continued. “The field of speculative extraterrestrial biology is small—only five hundred or so people in the world. And everyone I talk to—from Oxford professors to Tokyo University researchers—seems to agree that you could have led it if you hadn’t suddenly left.”