I moved in and squinted at one of the tags. It said “Four Loranna detected.” That was interesting. I glanced at some of the other tags. Some were Lorann counts; some were names of the companies, in cases where there was a sign on the front. Some even had phone numbers attached. Sheldon was certainly thorough.

Nat sighed and pointed wordlessly. I followed the line from her finger to a small annotation that said, “Harris Institute, nine Loranna detected.”

“That sounds like the entire third floor,” she commented.

“By which you mean management?” I asked.

Nat nodded. “Top executives, senior account reps … all the real decision makers. The number’s slightly low, but they might just not all be there.” Nat paused and stared into space, a slight frown on her face. “So, this is really weird. People I know, more or less—people I’ve worked with for a couple of years—may just turn out to be aliens bent on enslaving the Earth. I feel like I should be more freaked out, but I’m just rolling with it.”

“Wait until you wake up in the middle of the night, screaming,” Patrick said.

“Thanks for that image, Patrick. Wait—did you—?”

Patrick didn’t reply, merely shrugged.

I decided to change the subject and started pointing to items on the map. “Harris Institute: marketing analysis and campaign creation. Integra Polycomms: high-speed network provider. Morris Security Services. Harris Property Management. Kich and Robertson Legal Services. All the businesses that have presences are ones that would presumably be useful for their overall plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Loranna actually own the industrial park. It would give them complete control of what goes on, who gets rental space, and so on.”

“With enough regular but harmless businesses onsite, and enough human employees to provide protective coloration,” Patrick added. “It would be weird, for instance, if there were no places to eat and everyone went to the pet store every day for lunch. But now we have a plague of choices. Where do we start?”

“That’s easy,” Nat said. “My employer. I know my way around, at least the lower floors, and I can fake it on the third floor. Plus, I know a lot of the people.”

“Whoa, whoa, you’re jumping the gun a little,” I said. “What makes you even think you’ll be going in?”

“Oh, you are not going to try to play that chauvinistic, sexist crap—”

I cut her off. “No, I’m going to play that You’re short crap. Excuse me, I mean petite,” I amended, glancing at Patrick, who was overacting a death scene. “Remember what Sheldon said about a Gen trying to pass as human because of height?”