Page 11 of Overgrowth

Portland, Maine: July 20, 2031

Eighteen days pre-invasion

1.

David shouldered past us to take the lead, guiding us through an increasingly twisted maze of hallways that seemed to go on far longer than could be explained by the size of the observatory. After our third sharp left, he looked over his shoulder and said, “It’s bigger on the inside.”

“See, that’s funny when they do it on Doctor Who, but when we’ve just crossed the country to talk to a scientist who you’re now saying doesn’t exist, following a taxi driver to an unidentified location, it becomes creepy,” said Graham. He was still holding tightly to my hand. “This building is not bigger on the inside. The laws of physics say no.”

“True, but the laws of green architecture and fitting into the landscape say we have a lot more tunnels and underground labs than people would expect when they approach from the outside,” said David.

“Isn’t being underground sort of, I don’t know, contrary? When you’re supposed to be studying the sky?”

“Astrophysics doesn’t require an open window,” said David. “We like open windows, or we’d be geologists, but we can work pretty well in the dark.”

Graham squeezed my hand and said nothing.

I bit my lip. “Why did, um, Antonia lie about her name? Was it an accident?” That couldn’t be right. Whatever this was, it felt more like intentional deception than an accident.

“I’ll let her tell you.” David stopped at a half-open door, looking at the both of us gravely. He was still a bad liar. Nothing was going to change that. But seeing the expression on his face made me amend my first impression of him. He was a bad liar and a good friend. There were much worse things in this world.

Much worse.

“I’m going to sit in, if you don’t mind,” he said, tone clearly telegraphing how little he cared whether or not we minded. He was going to sit in no matter what we said. “Toni can get manic with strangers, and it’s best if I’m there to mediate.”

“Meaning…?” said Graham.

“Meaning her daddy bought this observatory for her so she’d be happy and out of the way, and even if she weren’t one of my best friends—which she is—I’d be defending her for the sake of maintaining our funding.”

I expected Graham to argue, if only for form’s sake. Instead, he grinned and said, “We have a guy in the Everglades whose grandparents gave him the funds to continue his research for a hundred and fifty years when they died. He counts alligators all day. Sometimes the people he works with have to fish him out of the alligators. I have never seen a man happier to get up and go to work every morning, and the people on his project don’t have to worry their grant will run out at the end of the year. I get where you’re coming from.”

“Good,” said David.

It did make sense, in a terrible way. More and more, science comes in two flavors: crowdsourced and privatized. Things that can be distributed over ten thousand hands get done on a shoestring, and things that are lucky enough to land a patron—or better yet, a rich kid with a genuine passion for the project and relatives who want to make them happy—get done with all the bells and whistles. It’s everything in between, the dull and difficult and less-than-profitable, that suffers.

David pushed the door the rest of the way open, declaring loudly, “We’re here, Toni.”

“Took you long enough.” Toni was sitting cross-legged in a desk chair with a laptop on her knees, leaning over it to type on a larger console. In case that wasn’t enough computing power, she had six more machines in easy view, and might well have a dozen more that were integrated into other systems or concealed by the towers of cardboard boxes.

One wall was dominated by black-and-white pictures and brightly colored cards covered in clearly handwritten notes. Pieces of string connected cards to pictures—sometimes multiple pictures for the same card—and pictures to each other, although none of the pictures had more than a single connection. I swallowed a gasp and pressed my knuckles against my lips as I spotted a familiar face among the gallery: my own.

I was one of three pictures with a piece of string connecting me to the card labeled WEST COAST . Of those three, I was the only one with a string also connecting me to WASHINGTON STATE .

I was also the only one of the three not connected to the card which read, simply, DECEASED . A startling number of pictures were connected to that card. An equally startling number of those pictures were of children, ranging from five or six years old up to their early teens.

“Sixty-three percent.”

I turned.

Toni was looking at me with sympathy. Her hands were still moving. She was apparently more than capable of typing blind—that, or she was just keysmashing to have something to do. I would have believed either.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Sixty-three percent of verified invaders did not survive to reach adulthood. About half died of allergic reactions or autoimmune conditions. As far as I know, none had the sort of autopsy that would have told us exactly why their DNA didn’t encode correctly—Wait.” She turned to David, frowning. “Do plants have DNA? Or are they something weird, like RNA or whatever?”

“Plants have DNA,” said David, in a tone that clearly stated that he had encountered this question before, multiple times. “They have chromosomes, too.”

“Huh.” Toni shook her head. “Okay, that’s weird. Why do plants need chromosomes? Do you know, Peony?” Her eyes were suddenly, unnervingly back on me. Again, there was that shock of recognition: I knew her. I just didn’t know how.

“Um,” I said. “No? I’m not a botanist.”

Toni blinked. “You’re not? Why the fuck not? You should be. I would be, if I hadn’t managed to get away. You stupid, Hyacinth?”

“Uh, my name is Anastasia,” I said. “‘Stasia’ is fine.”

“Oh, like ‘stamen.’”

“No, like a nickname for Anastasia,” I said, and glanced at Graham. He looked as confused as I felt. “I don’t have a plant name.”

“But you are one,” said Toni. “A plant. You didn’t run, run as fast as you can, and so the thing from space gobbled up the little gingerbread girl. I assume you’re here about my signal?”

“I—” I began.

Graham squeezed my fingers hard enough to break my train of thought. I glanced at him. He was shaking his hand, not vigorously, but just enough for me to see. I stopped talking.

“Yes,” he said. “We called before coming. I really want to see the source data.”

“Are you an astronomer, or an astrophysicist, or anything with ‘astro’ in the name?” She managed to make the question sound mild, but there were teeth in it. I could see them in the shadows around her smile.

“No,” said Graham.

“So you are…?”

“A herpetologist.”

“A herpetologist. I see. Do you normally figure out where the lizards are by listening to celestial signals? Because if that’s so, I may have missed my calling. I’m great with celestial signals, and I never know where the lizards are.”

“No,” said Graham. “I usually figure out where the lizards are by finding the places the lizards aren’t, and then following the lizards I know about back to the rest.”

Toni raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so maybe you do understand what I do. But the signals still aren’t going to make more sense to you in their raw form, unless you’d been hoping I’d make you copies to take back to someone who actually speaks the language of the stars.”

“Really, I was hoping you’d play them for us.” Graham seemed possessed of an almost-supernatural calm, like he had been playing games of verbal tag with this woman for years.

In a way, he had. Graham had always been happier to fight with words than with fists, and unlike me, he really wanted people to like him. Part of that was in the code-switching he did so easily, jumping without hesitation from one set of linguistic metaphors to the next. It made him an effective communicator and the life of the party, and I loved him for it, even as it could draw things out until I wanted to scream.

“Why?” asked Toni. She jerked her chin toward me. “Hoping she’ll be able to translate it for you, tell you it says ‘we come in peace’ and then you can go home feeling good about yourself, like the invasion isn’t on its way? Because I’m pretty sure that even if she says that’s what it says, that isn’t what it says at all. Nobody who takes this much time to infiltrate is coming in peace. Even if they’re lousy at infiltration.”

“I wouldn’t lie,” I said, before Graham could volley the ball back into her court. “If it doesn’t say they’re coming in peace, I won’t pretend it does.”

“Oh, no? Have you gone native? Is this going to be like Avatar in reverse?”

Graham blinked, looking between Toni and me. Finally, he settled on Toni. “Are you saying you actually believe Stasia is an alien?”

“Oh, no,” said Toni, making her eyes wide and guileless. “Gosh, golly, not at all. I maintain a cliché conspiracy wall for all sorts of things I don’t believe. Come back next month and you can see my wall explaining how The Blob was originally a documentary and that’s where all the high-fructose corn syrup in your breakfast cereal comes from.”

“Pretty sure the Blob was an alien too, Toni,” said David.

She snorted, as if that didn’t make any difference. Which maybe it didn’t. This was all ridiculous.

“Can we stop this and just hear the signal already?” I asked.

“Not until I believe you’ll tell the truth about what it says,” said Toni, folding her arms. At least that meant she wasn’t typing anymore. She glared at me, and there was a shattered menace in the expression that I hadn’t been expecting. “I’m not here to help you.”

“So why did you release the signal, anyway?” I pointed to David. “He says your parents fund this place, which means you keep your job even if you don’t release a signal from space—or maybe even if you do, when what you put out there is basically an announcement of invasion. You could have kept it. Picked it apart. Not helped the aliens you seem to believe are already here.”

“Seem to believe? Seem to believe? Hey, David, wanna see a neat trick?” She didn’t wait for his response before smiling at me, sticky-sweet, and asking, “Are you from this planet?”

“No, I’m the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant-people,” I said, before clapping my hand over my mouth. Through my fingers, I mumbled, “I didn’t mean to say that.” I wanted this woman to help us, and she seemed, if not outright hostile toward the aliens, at least to have some ulterior motive I couldn’t quite make out.

“But you did, because you always do. All of you do. It’s a compulsion. I think it’s part of the conversion process: they make you look like a human, they even make you think like a human, but they also make sure you’ll give yourself away if given the slightest opportunity to do so. Like, ordering fries at McDonald’s, would you like an alien invasion with that. It’s a bullshit tic and you all have it and it’s amazing.”

I frowned. Graham frowned. Graham recovered first.

“How many people with this compulsion have you met?” he asked.

“People? None. Alien invaders wearing skin suits? Fifteen. Sixteen if you count the one who was in the coma when I got there.” Toni was serene. “No way to confirm that one was an invader without a full autopsy, and her parents didn’t see the need for one, since she’d just eaten something that didn’t agree with her. People are so short-sighted sometimes.”

“You really do believe Stasia is an alien,” he said.

“Well, yes,” said Toni. “Don’t you? You came here with her.”

“Of course I do.” Graham glanced at me, and then back to her. “I love her. You believe the people you love. Believing she’s from outer space doesn’t hurt me. Choosing not to believe her would hurt her, and part of loving her is never hurting her when I have any way to avoid it.”

“Why do you believe me?” I asked.

Toni looked at me coldly, and rolled up her sleeves.

Exposed, the skin of her arms was paler than the skin on her hands and face, as if it had never seen the sun. Even so, I could see the thin web of scars that covered her from fingertip to bicep, extending up to where her shirt still covered her shoulders. It was like someone had used a tattoo gun filled with white ink to draw a grid, freehand, on her body. The lines weren’t straight. They curled and twisted from point to point, creating an unpredictable mesh that would have been virtually impossible to escape.

“I could strip, but this should give you the idea,” said Toni, and her voice was ice and ashes.

“I don’t—” I looked away from her skin, focusing on her eyes, and was momentarily struck silent by the hatred in her face. She looked like she would have happily set me on fire, just to see how long it would take for me to burn.

Was this how everyone was going to look at me, once they realized that I’d been telling the truth all along? Mandy and Graham believed me, but they believed me mostly because it didn’t hurt them. The invasion was going to hurt people. I knew that, as surely as I knew that it was coming—and that I needed to hear that signal.

“What happened to you?” I whispered, finally finding my voice.

Toni’s smile was like a razor.

“I tried to pick a flower,” she said.

My mouth went dry.