“Scio didn’t agree to it, though,” said Cora. “Dr. Sev agreed to it, and I asked Scio if he would do it. He declined.”

Finally the brigadier general spared her a glance— Porter, his name was, which she only caught once her vision de-blurred enough to read his name tag. “But we have no way of verifying that, do we? I find it highly questionable that an unqualified teenage civilian is the only ‘communication intermediary’ between extraterrestrial intelligences and the American government.”

That lit an anxiety fuse inside her. She wasn’t a teenager, and no one was qualified to be a communication intermediary, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t pressed just about every insecurity button she had.

“What is your goal, exactly?” asked Dr. Sev.

“To appraise the capabilities of the ETIs. But moreover, we need to know if any of them intend to use those capabilities.” Porter sighed, and Cora could all but see the rails switching routes in his mind. If Scio won’t talk, perhaps Esperas will. “There are two subgroups within the Fremda group, each with their own representative, correct?”

“There are not two ‘groups,’” clarified Sol. Sol Kaplan was in charge of the relatively small CIA contingent at the Riverside National Security Complex, which numbered somewhere between three and thirty, Cora wasn’t sure (and half the time, she didn’t know who was CIA and who just looked the part). “There is one group, and one . . . individual amygdaline we keep in seclusion.”

“And that would be ‘Scio.’” Porter sounded almost as uncomfortable with Ampersand’s Esperanto code name as she was. Unlike Esperas, who might sometimes communicate through a computer-based translator, Ampersand preferred his human intermediary, and unless one considered annoyed glares a form of communication, Ampersand refused to communicate any other way.

“Yes,” she said, leaving it at that. She didn’t want to give this man any ammo to confirm his suspicions of how out of place she was here. She was a college dropout with no training and no certifications and was only given top-secret clearance after Ampersand’s refusal to communicate without her stretched for an entire week before they panicked and let her into the club. So here she sat, underqualified, underpaid, and completely unappreciated. But she kept on, kept enduring this workplace, not only because a recession that was rapidly tumbling into a depression meant that jobs were scarce but because it was the only way she could guarantee access to Ampersand. Not that it was doing her mental health any favors, since the space aliens were also the root of most of her ills.

And if this headache was any indication, her condition was not improving.

When she’d seen a psychiatrist, she could not tell them what had actually happened to her three months ago, that she had been kidnapped by an alien Similar, a “militarist,” and held as ransom. She could not say that a twelve-foot monster had skewered her with its meat-hook digits, driven them straight through her body and into the cold ground. She could not tell the doctor that there were two weeks of her life after that that she did not remember.