She closes her eyes when his breath ruffles her hair like the stifling wind from an opened oven. The hair on the back of her neck is lifted, although she doesn't know it. The rubber band is closing in.

"The aliens weren't the part of the ending I hated," she says, fetched up on the curb, "I hated that they left everything else."

The ships. The second and third waves that were never going to happen. Melbourne and the bomb and John telling them all, with the most frantic, cornered, fucked up hideous conviction, that it was going to work.

"Before I woke up," with a measured evenness that is so far from herself it almost scares her, too, if there wasn't something else so much worse to be afraid of, "I was having a nightmare."