Page 13 of Overgrowth
Some bird I didn’t recognize was whistling and croaking in the trees across from the observatory. It sounded like a kind of owl. I walked toward it, head tilted back, trying to spot it against the foliage. Any bird that loud would have a certain amount of camouflage to help it out.
The parking lot fell away one step at a time, until I was standing in the shelter of the trees, surrounded by brown bark and leafy green, safely embraced by the growing world. I closed my eyes, thoughts of the owl forgotten as I breathed in deep, filling my lungs with the scent of the forest.
Lungs. There was an interesting question. Would my people even have lungs, or would they photosynthesize? Would I photosynthesize? The strange harmonics of the signal still echoed in my ears, making everything seem twisted and strange. I was the result of an alien seed blending with a terrestrial girl named Anastasia Miller. I had never delved too deeply into the question of my own biology, not because I wasn’t curious, but because there was no safe way to know. Hand myself over to a scientist and spend the rest of the time before the invasion held captive in a lab, waiting to be scraped across a thousand slides, studied in a million petri dishes. Enlist a friend and start a conspiracy. No. None of those things were for me. Better to live as an alien in a human world, knowing what was true without having any proof of it. But now…
The signal was here. People knew the invasion was coming, and whether or not we came in peace—“the harvest” didn’t sound like coming in peace—the humans weren’t going to see it that way. They would look at the vanguard, at people like me and Jeff and all those other faces on Toni’s wall, and they would see nothing but an armada of dead human children being worn as masks by alien intelligences. It wouldn’t matter that when we had done our replication, we’d been mindless seeds, acting on instinct alone, feeding on the meat our flowers provided for us. It wouldn’t matter that sometimes human infants killed their mothers in the process of being born, making us no different, really.
We were a loss of identity and a loss of life and an infiltration that had been going on for decades. They would feel the need to destroy us, if only for their own peace of mind. And that was if we were coming with open hands, as friends who just didn’t have the same ideas about the sanctity of the individual, who thought wearing familiar faces would make us seem like we were already part of the same team.
I didn’t think, I couldn’t think, that we were coming in peace. No one crosses that much distance, or sends scouts that far in advance with no way to contact the fleet and says, “No, don’t come; this place isn’t safe for us” if they’re coming in peace.
The wind whispered through the trees around me, the familiar, terrestrial trees, and I hesitated. Maybe we did have a way to talk to… home, or whatever I was supposed to call the nursery where I had been cultivated. What was the forest if not some vast communication device, one tailored to keep us connected to one another despite the incredible distance between?
Maybe we’d been talking to them all along.
I wandered deeper into the wood, trying not to think about Toni, who would never wander freely into the woods again. For her, just staying at the observatory, surrounded as it was by trees, had to be a trial. She did it anyway. There was something very foolish, and very human, about that.
A rock turned under my foot. I kicked it away, pausing as I heard it skid over leaves and fall over a previously unseen drop. More cautious now, I inched forward and peered down. The land cut away, revealing a long expanse of open space that ended when it reached the road.
Three white cars were winding their way along that stretch of gray concrete. This far above them, I couldn’t see any markings on their sides… but I could see the lights on top. They were turned off now. They could start flashing with the flick of a switch.
The cars, and their lights, were heading for the observatory.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, nearly dropping it in the loam as I fumbled to bring up the main screen. Once there, I swiped on Graham’s number and brought the phone to my ear, counting anxiously down from ten until—
“Hello? Stasia? Where are you?”
“In the woods across the parking lot,” I said hurriedly. “Graham, you have to get out of there.”
“I’m in the lobby. Looking for you.”
“The police are coming!”
There was a split second of frozen silence. Then Graham snapped, “Turn your crowd beacon on and stay exactly where you are.” He hung up.
I lowered my phone, gaping at it in horror before bringing up my app list and activating the crowd beacon. It had been designed for public places like amusement parks and shopping malls. When it was on, anyone who had your specific key could use it to find you. Since it wasn’t on by default, like some of the kid trackers, it wasn’t so much an invasion of privacy as it was a way to keep the party from being split. Better yet, the security locks on a crowd beacon were proprietary and couldn’t be used by law enforcement—despite several lawsuits that had tried to change that. If the police turned on a wide-band signal detector, they’d be able to follow my phone into the woods, but without a warrant or an unethical computer technician, they wouldn’t know it was mine, just that it was there.
And despite that, I carefully set my phone on a nearby stump, covering it with a handful of fallen leaves, before retreating behind a thick-trunked tree. Better safe than sorry. Better out of sight than presenting a clear target.
Hunching down slightly to make myself seem even smaller, I waited.
Seconds slid by, blossoming into minutes, until I began to fear we’d been too late: whatever instinct had told me the police didn’t mean Graham any good had come too late, and he had been taken, arrested and carried off to tell them everything he knew about the alien signal. It didn’t matter if what he knew was best categorized as “not much”: he was a scientist, he’d traveled across the country to listen to the raw data, he was a threat. People were scared. They were looking for something to point at and say, “That, right there, is the enemy.” Graham would work well enough.
Humans love having an easy bad guy. Plant people from outer space, that’s hard. Someone who was conspiring with them somehow, but was otherwise entirely human and comprehensible? Now that was a bad guy to believe in.
Someone was walking through the woods. More than one someone, if I could believe what I heard. I drew farther back behind my tree, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Graham walked into view, heading unerringly for my phone. David and Toni were close behind him, Toni hanging limply off David’s arm. Her eyes were closed. She looked like she was about to be sick. Fleeing into the forest like this must have been virtually impossible for her. She’d done it anyway. My instincts about the police must have been correct.
Pulling my phone from beneath the layer of leaves, Graham straightened and looked around himself in a slow circle, scanning the trees—first at ground level, then higher up, like he thought I might have decided to hide by fleeing straight up.
“The police aren’t with us, Stasia,” he said quietly. “It’s safe. Come out.”
I stepped out from behind the tree, not missing the way he sagged in sudden relief at the sight of me. “What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “When I told them you’d seen police cars coming, they insisted on coming with me. We barely made it into the trees before they pulled up outside.”
“That’s not so bad,” I said. “Maybe I was overreacting.”
“They shot the receptionist,” said David flatly.
There didn’t seem to be any appropriate reply to that. I just stared as he shook his head, still holding Toni up.
“Not with a bullet,” he said. “I’m not sure a Taser is any better, but at least she’s not dead. She’ll be able to sue the pants off of them.”
“Assuming they don’t disappear her to some secret prison in the middle of nowhere,” said Toni. She jabbed a finger at me. “This is all your fault.”
“How the hell is—?”
“You’re the one who had to tell the world you were an alien! You flying to see me right after the signal went public must have thrown up a million red flags. Even people who didn’t want to believe this was really happening would have questions about that. You needed to stay down. ”
I frowned. “You’re the one who said disclosure was a compulsion for us.”
“Yeah, and if you’ve lived with a compulsion for your entire life, you learn how to deal with it. You learn how to make it not so damn bad.” Toni cast a frightened look back over her shoulder. “If they come looking for us, they’re going to find us. Who knows what happens then? I’m too young and brilliant to go to prison. I need to stay wild and free and join the Earth resistance against the invasion.”
“I’m a little more concerned about what happens when we try to fly home,” said Graham grimly. “If they’ve put us on a no-fly or tagged us for the TSA to detain, we’re never going to make it back to the West Coast.”
“Yes, that’s far worse than getting shot,” said David.
“It might include getting shot,” said Graham.
“I have an idea.” I looked at my phone, and then back at the others. “But you may not like it very much.”
“What is it?” asked Graham.
I told them.
4.
Working our way down the back side of the mountain took the better part of an hour. David had to carry Toni almost the entire way. She’d be fine for a few steps, and then she’d brush up against a tree, and suddenly her legs wouldn’t work right. It was all unreasoning terror, and I felt a little bad about it. After all, it had been one of our conversion flowers that had done this to her.
Then again, if it had worked, if she had been digested and remade as my sister, would I have felt bad about that? Or would I have been overjoyed to meet someone like myself, someone who remembered what it was to follow the scent of heaven through a dark forest and come out the other side, transformed into something better than they’d been before?
The thought of Graham meeting a conversion flower, coming out vegetable and perfect, flitted across my mind and disappeared, leaving my cheeks hot and my skin uncomfortably tight. That, too, was a conundrum of a sort. If we were plants at heart, why did I have these damned mammalian biological responses?
Graham caught up with me, catching my elbow and pulling me closer as he whispered, “Are you sure about this?”
“Nope,” I said. There was no point in lying to him. We were committed to our course. More, I had already lied to him once today, and that was my limit. “I don’t have a better idea, though. Do you?” No car, no resources, no one to come and rescue us.
No one except Jeff, who was close enough to come get us from the base of the hill, and who had been able to track me down in the dream of a forest, where humans had no business going. He might not be the perfect answer, but he was the answer we had.
Graham shook his head, looking even more frustrated. “I wish you’d told me about this guy sooner.”
“Why? So you could have explained why he wasn’t who he was saying he was, even though it didn’t make sense for him to be anyone else?” I paused. “I hope you followed that.”
“I wish I hadn’t.” Graham glanced over his shoulder at David and Toni before looking back to me and saying, “I have always believed you when you told me where you came from. Always. ”
“Yes, you have. But I feel like that was a lot easier to do before things started getting complicated.”
“Honey, things have been complicated since our first date. Remember?”
I smiled despite myself. It had been Halloween. Graham had dressed up as Steve Irwin, binding his breasts until he could barely breathe, while I had dressed as Audrey from the musical Little Shop of Horrors, poking fun at what I knew the other students thought of me and putting my own breasts on convenient display at the same time. I’d been trying to get Graham to like me. He had… but he’d also been too enthusiastic about his binding, and he’d passed out from lack of air in the middle of our embrace. I’d wound up supporting him, screaming about how I’d killed my boyfriend, until someone called campus medical. Not exactly the sort of first date that makes the world believe in romance.
“I remember,” I said, and sighed. “I’m sorry. This is complicated for me, too.”
“Yeah.” He was quiet for a moment before he asked, “Stasia? You’d tell me if there was a way to make this less dangerous, wouldn’t you?”
He was still being so careful not to question the invasion. I couldn’t decide whether that was because he truly believed me, or whether it was because he had long since decided it was better not to argue with me about whether or not I came from outer space. In the end, it didn’t matter. The invasion was coming, whether he believed in it or not. Whether anyone believed in it or not. The invasion didn’t care whether people believed it. It was a fact, as implacable as gravity or the speed of light, and it was going to happen no matter what anybody had to say on the matter.
“I would,” I said, and I meant it. If I had known exactly what form the invasion was going to take, the shape of any places that might escape their notice, I would have drawn him a map. I loved him. I wanted him to be safe.
That, too, was a part of cultural literacy: having the connections within a community to care about the people it contained. Again, something about the thought gnawed at me, like there was something in the shape of the concept that would tell me everything I still needed to know. The inside of my elbow itched for the first time since I’d stepped into the trees. I scratched it idly, and felt skin tear beneath my nails. Felt the strange, almost-lumpy shape of the flesh beneath.
The edge of the forest caught us like a knife’s edge, so abrupt it was almost unbelievable. One moment we were walking through the trees, and the next we were stepping onto a muddy embankment, with only a few feet separating us and the road. A white van was parked there, a radio station’s logo and call sign on the side. The distinguishing markings were more than half-covered with mud, making them more of a puzzle than anything else. Was that a 5, or the letter S, or something else? Was that a falcon or the curve of a very strange wolf’s flank?
The van door opened.
Jeff stepped out.
I gaped, briefly unable to find the words to say anything. He was here. He was real. I’d known he existed since his first text, but somehow I hadn’t quite made the leap that would translate that into the material world where Graham and I could meet him.
He was taller than either of us, although not as tall as David, with light brown skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes. His Chinese heritage showed in the shape of his face and the cast of his features, while his blue jeans and gray sweatshirt were as nondescript as his van. No one who saw him would think twice about what he was doing there, or think to report him to the police for anything less than witnessing him actually committing a crime.
There was a white bandage taped over his right cheek.
He looked at the four of us, scanning each of our faces before his eyes settled on me and a grin spread across his face. “Stasia,” he said, and his voice was longing and relief and yes, affection, so bone-deep and pure that it made me want to sink into the ground. I didn’t even know this man, and he was looking at me like I was the solution to every question he had never quite known how to ask. “You came.”
“We could say the same for you,” said Graham, angling his body slightly so that it was between me and this relative stranger, this man of my literal dreams. “Thanks for coming to get us. We could have been in real trouble back there.”
“You still could be,” said Jeff, his smile fading, replaced by a coolly calculating expression. “Did anyone see you go into the woods?”
“No,” said Graham.
“Are you sure?”
“The man’s sure,” said David. “We’d have noticed if a bunch of armed police were following us through the forest.”
“And you didn’t mention my name while you were inside the facility?”
“No.” This time it was Toni who spoke. She gave him a level look. “You’re not on my wall of crazy, either.”
Jeff blinked, visibly confused. “What?”
“I’ll tell you in the van,” I said. “Can we get out of here? I don’t know how long we have before the cops come back down the road.”
“Your wish is my command, literally,” he said, and opened the front passenger door for me. There was only one seat up there with him. Refusing to take it seemed unwise. I still glanced back at Graham, waiting for him to say something before I got in.
He nodded.
I got in. The others climbed into the back; Jeff started the engine, and we were away.