Page 10 of Overgrowth

Chapter 5

Portland, Maine: July 20, 2031

Eighteen days pre-invasion

1.

We landed after local midnight, collecting our bags from the carousel and following the signs to the taxi station. A man who looked as weary as I felt was there to help us load our suitcases into the trunk of his black town car. Graham rattled off the address of our hotel as we slid into the backseat. The driver nodded, and that was it: we were free from the orbit of the airport, pulling away without interference from the security guards we had seen stationed at unnervingly regular intervals throughout the terminal.

Portland looked like any other city in the dark. We drove past homes and businesses, most with their lights turned low or entirely off, letting the night sky shine through. And what a sky it was. It was like climbing up Mt. Rainier, far from the city light pollution, and looking out across the endless sea of stars. I barely managed to fight the urge to roll down the window and stick my head out of the car, like a dog overjoyed by the idea of going for a ride. I wanted to see those stars. I wanted to see where the signal, my signal, was coming from.

I wanted a distraction from the itch that still burrowed in the crook of my left elbow, roiling and stinging and catching my attention every few seconds, whether I wanted it to or not. It hurt. Not constantly, but often enough that I could never quite forget that it was there, or allow it to fade away.

The face of the man in the forest… I couldn’t quite remember what I’d seen, but I knew it wasn’t anything that could ever pass for human, not once he took the bandage away. Jeff. His name was Jeff. It was a silly name for an alien invader, simple and ordinary and human.

I snorted soft amusement, earning myself a curious, sleepy glance from Graham. Was “Anastasia” any better? We had picked up our names when we picked up our forms, and this part of the planet didn’t really like it when people refused the names their parents had given them. It had taken Graham almost two years to get his parents to stop calling him by his birth name, and his change had come with a physical transformation. Mine hadn’t.

Not yet. If Jeff was anything to go by, or if the itch at my elbow signified what I’d dreamt, it was coming.

“You okay?” asked Graham.

I turned to offer him the warmest smile I could muster. It wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be. I was tired, and scared, and I itched. “Just woolgathering,” I said. “We’re going to the observatory in the morning, right?”

“As soon as we’re ready to face the world.” Graham grimaced. “I couldn’t get us an appointment with Dr. Vornholt, since he doesn’t seem to exist. But if we show up, we may be able to track him down.”

And once we had tracked him down, he would be able to play the signal for us, without filtering or distortion. That was our goal: to hear the aliens loud and clear and unencumbered, to find out whether this was a hoax or a uniquely distorted episode of The Brady Bunch somehow bouncing back to us off of a distant satellite. That was what Graham wanted, anyway. I didn’t need to hear the clean signal to know that it was real. I knew that. I needed to know what it meant —and how close the people who’d sent it were. Because it felt like they were almost here. Hearing the signal without distortions would give me a clearer idea of what to expect. I knew it.

This—the strange, not entirely voluntary game I’d been playing since I was three years old—was finally coming to an end, and when it got there, I was going to find out where my loyalties really were. I was going to find out what was under my own skin. Again, my memory shied away from whatever it was I had seen when Jeff had revealed himself to me. I wasn’t ready for it yet. Maybe I was never going to be ready.

“This is one hell of a way to run an invasion,” I muttered.

Graham shifted next to me, his shoulder brushing against mine. “What was that?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, and I meant it. There was nothing I wanted to say, because I didn’t know how to say it. Not with the driver right there, capable of listening to every word we said. Not when my own thoughts were in so much disarray. I needed to get more sleep than I’d been able to manage on the plane. I needed to go back to the forest and make it all the way to the sweet, subtle embrace of the dragonfly flowers.

I could ask them what I’d seen on Jeff’s face, what was growing under my own skin, and maybe they would answer me. Maybe they would understand the importance of telling me what was going on. I couldn’t do my part for the invasion—whatever that part was supposed to be—if I was busy being scared out of my mind.

Graham’s hand settled on my knee. “Hey,” he said. “Look at me.”

I looked at him.

He was a wraith in the pale glow through the car windows, a figure of smoke and shadows. The short, bristling hairs on his cheeks glowed almost silver where the light hit them, standing out from his skin in a way they never did when the sun was up. He smiled at me, the expression sketched more in motion than in visible skin.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We’re going to figure this out together, and everything’s going to be fine.”

I didn’t believe him. I smiled back anyway. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do: just look at the future racing toward you, and smile, and hope it doesn’t hurt when it arrives.

2.

Steam billowed around me as I showered, filling the bathroom with a hot cloud of vanilla-scented moisture. I turned my face into the spray, letting it wash over me, wiping the last of my long night’s sleep away. The itching in my elbow retreated in the face of the hot water, wrapping itself tight around my bones. It would be back. I could feel it lurking, waiting for the opportunity to rise and try again.

I had slept soundly once we were finally in our own room, where it was safe to strip and collapse into the mattress, feeling the plastic anti-bedbug liner crinkle under my body as I buried my face in the pillow. The aches in my back and hip from a night of sprawling perfectly still, Graham pressed against me like a personal space heater, were proof of that.

But the dreams had never come. No alien forest for me, perfect trees beneath an unseeable sky; no comforting embrace of impossible flowers with their rippling, rattling petals. If I’d dreamed at all, I didn’t remember it, and as the shower blasted away the last of the night’s cobwebs, I had to wonder why not. The forest wasn’t always there, but when I needed it…

When I needed it, it came. It had come on the plane, and—

“Stasia?” Graham sounded groggy. I had claimed first shower, and we’d agreed to take turns, not wanting to get distracted with biological needs when we had so much to get done today. “Honey, your phone’s blowing up. Are you sure you told work that you were going to be gone for a few days?”

“What?” I turned the water off, having long since rinsed the last of the shampoo out of my hair, and pulled the shower curtain aside. Graham was standing there in his boxer shorts, the scars that ran beneath his pectoral muscles flushing red in the heat.

“Your phone,” he said. “It’s on the bed. Someone’s been texting you for the last ten minutes.”

It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet. That made it not quite six in Washington: if either Lucas or Mandy was texting me, the house was probably on fire. Mom wouldn’t text, she’d call, and the odds were good that she wouldn’t do either. That left a remarkably short list of people who had my number and had some reason to contact me. Not good.

“Huh,” I said, and stepped out of the shower.

Graham grinned as he watched me grab my towel and roughly dry off. “See, if this were a different kind of trip, this is where I’d say I was lying to get you out into the open.”

“If this were a different kind of trip, you would have been in the shower with me.” I kissed his cheek, wrinkled my nose, and added, “Shave,” before leaving the bathroom. His laughter chased me out.

My phone was on the bed, as he had told me it would be, and it was buzzing near-constantly as it lit up with incoming messages. I sat down, frowning at the number on the screen. It wasn’t one I knew. I swiped my thumb across the glass, and felt my stomach plummet toward my feet, even as my lungs seemed to forget what they were supposed to do with the air they already held. Taking in more was unthinkable.

I know you’re there, read the latest text.

Above it: come on don’t be like this do you know how hard it is to find us?????

Above that: Anastasia Miller. You’re the only one I’ve found who made national news when you sprouted. Did you have to go and snatch a toddler? Well done. If the whole invasion is like you, we’re screwed.

Quickly, with shaking hands, I swiped my thumbs in the patterns the screen would recognize as words, asking, Who is this?

The reply came only a few seconds later, so fast that it almost seemed like it must have been keyed in before I could even ask.

You know who this is.

Then: We met in the forest.

Then: I work w/computers. Finding your number was easy.

Then: You should have hid better.

Slowly, I let my phone drop to my lap and stared at the wall, my mouth working although no sound came out. Jeff. Jeff, from the forest; Jeff, with the bandage on his cheek and the alien impossibility beneath it.

Jeff, who I’d never met when I was awake: who might as well have existed only in my dreams, until he somehow found my phone number and decided to exist when I was awake, too. Jeff, who walked under the same trees I did, who looked upward and strained to see the same elusive sky.

If Graham hadn’t been the one to pull me out of the shower, I might have thought Jeff’s texts were an illusion, something I’d invented to alleviate my concerns about going to the observatory. But they weren’t. They were real, and Jeff was real, and this was it: the proof I’d been seeking for so long. I didn’t need to hear the signal to know the aliens were real. I could simply point to the man who walked, impossibly, in my dreams, and say, “See? If he’s real, I’m real, and if I’m real, you need to listen to me.”

Not that it would prove anything to people who didn’t want it to. Jeff could be someone I’d met online, or a fellow liar, or any one of a dozen things, none of which said “alien” to the average skeptic.

My phone buzzed again. I looked down.

You there?

He wasn’t going to stop. If I was being honest, I couldn’t blame him. I’d been trying to find proof of what I was for most of my life, and I had to assume he’d been doing the same, fighting to find his footing in a world that didn’t want to allow for children to be snatched away and replaced by their own alien counterparts. We were the changelings of the science fiction age, and that made us both terrifying and untrue. Jeff had to be as frustrated as I was by the way he’d been forced to conceal himself, trapped in a world full of humans who never wanted to believe him.

Can’t talk now, I typed hurriedly. Going to observatory.

To hear the signal?

Y.

Talk later???

Two words, and a lifetime of isolation, of longing, of the need to find someone who would understand. I didn’t hesitate. I typed Yes and pressed Send before I could change my mind, then dropped the phone to the bed and stood, heading for my suitcase. It was time to get dressed. Graham never took long in the shower, and I didn’t want to be the reason we were late.

I was dressed and pinning my hair into a tight, low-maintenance bun that wouldn’t look rumpled as it dried when Graham emerged, back in his boxers, toweling his hair with one hand. He had taken the time to shave. The crisp, acerbic smell of aftershave followed him into the room, woody and somehow green, like he’d rubbed an entire herb garden on his cheeks. He raised his eyebrows as he looked at me.

“Who was that?”

“A friend from high school who saw I was in his time zone from Mandy’s social media. She’s about as discreet as a tank.” The lie came smooth, easy, and embarrassing. Lying to Graham was the last thing I wanted to do. But Graham was human and Jeff was not, and while I wasn’t ready to shift my loyalties that completely—I loved Graham, loved the reality of him, the smell of his skin when I woke up in the middle of the night, the feel of his stubble against my lips; I barely knew Jeff as anything more than a faintly terrifying figure in my dreams—I knew I needed to keep them apart. Just for now. Just long enough to learn more about what was about to happen.

“Oh, neat.” Graham moved toward his own suitcase. “We going to get together before we head home?”

The casual way he said “we” made my heart clench in my chest, reminding me of my own traitorous thoughts. Once the invasion was here, there wasn’t going to be a “we” anymore, not in the sense he meant it. There would be “us” and there would be “them,” and the lines would be drawn on species, not on emotion.

Somehow, my smile still came when I called for it, curving my lips upward in apparent agreement. “If things work out,” I said. “Wear the green shirt. It makes you look more like a professor and less like a grave robber.”

“I’m not a professor.”

“You’re not a grave robber either, and we still get followed by security every time we’re in a cemetery.”

Graham laughed and kept laughing the whole time he was getting dressed, stealing little glances at me and chuckling to himself. I finished pinning my hair, still smiling, and hoped he couldn’t see how frightened I was.

One of the nice things about not liking people very much: I’ve had plenty of practice at deflection. Make someone laugh and they’ll stop wondering what it is you’re really thinking about, what it is you’re really doing. It works as well with the few people who I actually care about as it does with the rest of the world. Maybe better, even. People know when someone doesn’t like them, and they’re wary. They look for hidden double meanings. Sometimes they even find them.

It’s easier to hate people when you like them, and on that paradox is the whole of human experience constructed.

“How do I look?”

I turned, considering Graham frankly. The green shirt did in fact give him a professorial air, at least when compared to the things he usually wore. His tie was brown, matching his jacket. He was wearing jeans, but that was all right: most of the scientists I know seem to consider jeans a uniform unto themselves, at least when they’re outside the lab. It would have been a problem if I’d tried to pull the same thing—women don’t get nearly as much leeway in this world as men, at least not where clothing is concerned—but on him, it worked. I smiled. If he noticed the expression was strained around the edges, he didn’t say anything, and for that, I loved him more than ever.

“Great,” I said.

“So do you.” He pulled out his phone, tapping an app to summon our car, and nodded at the screen before putting it away. “Our ride will be here in five minutes.”

I nodded. “Then let’s move.”

The hotel was old enough to be rustic and new enough to be modern, a combination that seemed to fit Portland as a whole, at least based on the narrow slice of it I’d seen so far. Everything was in good repair, clean enough to shine, and yet looked like it belonged in this world of endless trees. It was a lot like Washington, only older. The city’s bones were closer to the surface.

We walked through the quiet, well-lit lobby, past businessmen getting ready to head out to whatever meeting had been deemed important enough to drag them away from their homes, past small family groups, the parents looking frayed while the sleepy children read or played with toys as if the world weren’t in the process of changing forever. Graham leaned toward me.

“This place should be twice this full during the summer, and a lot of the guests would be staycationers,” he murmured. “It’s not just travel that’s down.”

I didn’t bother asking how he knew that. His work takes him all over the country, since it’s not like reptiles have the courtesy to all live in the same place for ease of study. Everyplace we’ve ever gone, Graham has had some little piece of local knowledge that makes it clear he’s been there before. It’s comforting, in a strange sort of way. I can’t get lost when I have someone to show me the way. There’s no replacement for familiarity.

Something about that thought snagged in my mind like a fishhook, tugging and tugging and refusing to be dislodged. I worried at it as I followed Graham out of the hotel and into the crisp morning air. It was early enough that the humidity hadn’t fully descended to wrap the city in a warm, wet blanket yet, but it was coming: oh, yes, it was coming. And when it got here, we were all going to pay for doubting its power.

Our driver was a pleasantly smiling woman in overalls and earmuffs, which seemed idiosyncratic for the season, to say the absolute least, but was none of my business. We slid into the backseat, and Graham confirmed the address of our destination. I leaned against the window, staring at the buildings around us as they scrolled by, dense at first, then giving way to residential streets speckled with trees, and finally becoming nothing but forest.

Familiarity. It was something to do with familiarity. That was the key to everything. That was… that was…

We turned up a winding road that could have done with some serious repaving. I squeaked as I was jostled away from the window by the bouncing of our tires.

“Sorry,” said the driver, in a cheerfully unrepentant tone. “We haven’t been able to get this road repaved in years. Budget cuts and private land and you know how it is, right?”

“Right,” said Graham, with a laugh, and the two of them began talking rapidly about the difficulty in getting fair distribution of civic and federal funds. I tuned them out, returning my attention to the window.

The trees were so different than the ones in Washington. I was used to oceans of evergreens, a living sea defined by needles and cones and the smell of sap. In contrast, these trees were tall, skeletal things, their bark white, or brown, or even gray, peeling and pitted and altogether strange, but familiar at the same time. All trees were the same trees, in the deeper pulse of root and wood and slow, constant growth. All trees carried the weight of the world.

There are trees everywhere in the universe, but mammals only show up on one planet in four, I thought, and made the conscious decision not to question myself. Answers were starting to bubble up from the topsoil of my heart, and I’d be happier if they came at their own pace. I was absolutely certain of that.

Graham and our driver were talking about the observatory now. She was chattering on about the architectural significance of the building, the fights that had been undertaken on a scientific and a civic level to make sure everything was constructed just so to maximize their efficiency and flexibility. There were little touches that would be invisible to the uninformed outsider: the planetarium off the cafeteria, too small for school groups but large enough to awe investors who were considering funding the study of the stars; the herb garden out back, which kept the kitchen smelling sweet and the astronomers and astrophysicists smiling. Most of them lived on-site during their shifts, preferring a small dorm and a thin mattress over the risk of missing something.

It sounded perfect. It sounded idyllic, even. Which probably meant there was something she wasn’t telling us—and why shouldn’t there be? I sat up straighter, looking narrow-eyed at the back of our driver’s head. She was an independent cabbie, the sort of person who could be hired via app from a smartphone. Why did she know so much about the observatory, when it wasn’t a major tourist destination and didn’t hold that much appeal to anyone who wasn’t like Graham, hardwired to see science as the answer to every question the world had to offer?

I frowned. Something about this wasn’t right.

The road wound up the side of a sloping hill, until we broke out of the trees and into a wide, clear area. A vast concrete-and-chrome building dominated the clearing, topped with several retractable domes. About half the parking spots were filled. Our driver pulled up in front of the doors.

“Here you are, safe and sound,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Graham. He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen, transmitting the fare and tip—a fairly healthy one, probably inspired by their conversation.

I got out of the car. I walked to the curb. And I waited.

Graham got out a moment later, stepping onto the curb next to me. He followed my gaze to the car, which was idling, presumably while our driver prepared for her next call. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Go on inside. I’ll be there in a second.”

“I’ll go let them know we’re here to talk to Dr. Vornholt,” he said, and kissed my cheek before heading for the doors.

I took a few steps backward, making it look like I was planning to follow him. And again, I waited. Waited while the car pulled away from the front of the observatory. Waited while it drove, not toward the driveway down to the main road, but behind the building, out of sight. It stopped there, unable to get out without passing me. I frowned, and considered following.

Graham was waiting. I’d ask him to use a different car service to get us home. Turning, I walked into the lobby, into the cool rush of sterile, treated air, kept steady at a temperature several degrees cooler than the outside.

“It gets hot as hell here in Maine,” said a friendly voice. Graham and I looked toward it. A tall, beefy man in a white coat over a vintage Steven Universe T-shirt was bearing down on us, a wide smile on his round face. His hair was styled in short dreadlocs and pulled back in a ponytail that should have looked silly, yet somehow just looked practical, like all men ought to consider wearing their hair that way.

His smile helped. His teeth were remarkably white, and his skin was dark enough that the contrast drew and trapped the eye, making it hard to look away. I thought he was one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen, which made it a little confusing that he was hiding himself away at a small observatory in the middle of Maine and not starring in some half-baked network drama Tuesday nights at nine.

He seemed to catch my confusion, because the smile softened around the edges as he said, “I can see you’ve traveled a long way, and you’re not reporters, which is nice. They’ve mostly tapered off by this point. There’s nothing new for the news cycles here, and they didn’t like the way we kept asking them for donations. To whom am I speaking?”

“Dr. Graham Fordham,” said Graham, extending his hand with a bright smile of his own. The stranger clasped it, and the two of them formed a brief, perfect image out of a recruiting poster. Become a scientist, spend all your time surrounded by beautiful men as you unlock the secrets of the universe. Dental plan clearly included.

“Dr. David Tillman,” said the stranger, smiling again as he pulled his hand away. He looked toward me, expecting another title, another doctor or professor, another scientist. Why else would we be here, if we weren’t with the press, and weren’t with the government?

“Anastasia Miller,” I said. I stuck my hand out and he took it, staring at me as he carefully, almost timidly, gave it a shake.

“Miller,” he repeated, in a tremulous voice.

“Yes.”

“The abductee.”

“You know, we’ve been dating for a decade, and I’ve never seen this many people recognize you,” said Graham, voice pitched high, like he was trying to lighten the mood. He looked between us, measuring the situation, deciding whether or not he needed to intervene. “Are you about to start showing up in the tabloids?”

“I think you mean ‘again,’” said Dr. Tillman, removing his hand from mine. He made the gesture graceful, even elegant, and not as rushed as he clearly wanted it to be. A professional, then, and a good man: good enough to care about the feelings of a potentially dangerous stranger.

He looked at me, and his gaze was measuring, taking in and breaking down every inch of me, rendering me component and complete. “Miss Miller was in the papers quite a bit when I was in school. Seems she’s from another planet, and she’s here to provide lucky numbers and diet tips.”

My cheeks reddened. “It turns out you can’t sue the gossip magazines for making stuff up, as long as what they make up is ridiculous enough,” I said. “I never said I knew how to help people lose weight or… or get in touch with their cosmic spirit guides or anything like that. I never would. Aliens don’t need to commit acts of cultural appropriation.”

Dr. Tillman blinked. Then he laughed. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here, Miss Miller. Did I miss the part where your alien friends told you to come to Maine?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I called ahead,” said Graham. “I spoke to your administrator. I told her we wanted to hear the alien signal without distortion or modification by the local equipment, and she said it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“We’d also like to meet Dr. Vornholt,” I added. “We’ve been trying to track him down. It hasn’t worked very well.”

“Ah.” David hesitated. He wasn’t a very good liar: maybe astronomers didn’t need to be. Maybe a life spent staring up at the stars could be essentially honest, as long as you weren’t the one in charge of securing funding for the new telescope or to put a new roof on the observatory. Academia would have eaten this man alive if he’d stayed closer to the universities. Instead, he had sought isolation, and been able to stay a lousy liar long enough for us to meet up with him.

There was a certain beautiful inevitability to the whole thing. I just wished I could understand what it was going to be.

My elbow itched. I put a hand over it, and I didn’t scratch.

“Is that a problem?” pressed Graham.

“Nah,” said a voice behind us.

We turned. There, wearing a slightly stained white coat over her coveralls, was our driver, earmuffs still clamped firmly over her ears. Her hair was a frizzy corona of white-blonde strands, standing out in all directions like it was doing its best impression of a halo. She had her hands shoved into her pockets and was rocking back onto her heels, looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

I met her eyes for the first time, and flinched. I knew her. I’d never seen her before, but I knew her, the same way I knew my own reflection. Something about her made the air electric, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end in instinctive warning. I wanted to grab Graham and run.

I stayed right where I was.

“I mean, yeah, if you really wanted to meet Anthony Fabris,” said the driver. Tilting her head, she continued philosophically, “Meeting fictional characters has always been difficult without the aid of psychotropic substances.”

“Toni,” hissed David.

“It’s cool,” she said, and fixed her eyes on me. “I knew one of them would show up to see the data. I mean, it was inevitable, fictional characters or no. I sort of expected it to be one of the closer ones, or maybe one of the Canadians. Like Rick Patton from Toronto. Did you know he still does his little internet advice show? ‘Plant Person Pointers,’ it’s called. Guy is gonzo for alliteration.”

Something about her unwavering gaze made me want to squirm, and made the itch inside my elbow even stronger. I pressed my palm down against it, hard, trying to compress the sensation away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to stop looking at her. My eyes refused to focus on anything else.

“No one ever does,” said the woman—Toni—with a shrug. Her eyes were that terrible shade of blue that seems almost white as it moves toward the pupil, like it swallowed so much light that there was no possible way she could have seen with any clarity.

“I’m sorry,” said Graham. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Antonia Fabris,” said the woman. She smiled, sudden and gregarious, and was the chatty driver who’d carried us here from our hotel once more. “I caught the signal out of space, because I’ve been listening for it for a long, long time. And now I’ve caught you. I assume you’re here because you wanted to get a look at the raw data and convince yourselves it had been fiddled with and there isn’t really an alien armada on the way? Anyway, you should follow me.”

She turned then, walking briskly across the lobby and down a narrow hallway on the other side. David cleared his throat nervously.

“I, uh. I’d go with her if you want her to remember to show you the data, and not get distracted by hunting for an article she saw somewhere five years ago that will let her prove there’s life on Procyon Three,” he said. At our blank looks, he shrugged. “Toni sort of sets her own agenda.”

“I’m starting to get that,” said Graham slowly.

“We need to go after her,” I said.

He looked at me. I shook my head.

“Something about her… She knows what the signal really is,” I said. “She’s the answer.”

Graham nodded, and took my hand, and we walked, with David close behind us, down the scientific rabbit hole to a stranger’s Wonderland.