Page 14 of Overgrowth

Portland, Maine: July 20, 2031

Eighteen days pre-invasion

1.

Jeff was silent until we reached the bottom of the hill and merged onto the local highway. It was a two-lane road, with a number instead of a name, and there was enough traffic that we would no longer stand out as a lone vehicle where it had no business being.

Once we were safely rolling along, passing houses and rickety gas stations, he glanced at me sidelong and said, in a low voice, “I wasn’t sure you were really real.”

“You texted me.”

“I could have been texting… anybody. You could have been literally anybody. But you’re you. You’re the girl from the forest, and you’re real and here and in my van.” His cheeks turned red, the skin around the bandage showing its color patchily, like something was interfering with the blood flow. “I’ve never met anyone like us before.”

“Like us?”

“You know… us.” He glanced at the rearview mirror. The van was partitioned inside, with the passengers sharing bench seats that put them too far from the driver for reasonable conversation. I got the feeling that wasn’t an accident. He didn’t want them involved in this moment. He didn’t want them anywhere near him—or near me. Given a choice, he wouldn’t have let them in the car. He would have just left them in the woods and driven away.

I thought of Toni’s wall of pictures, of the labels reading DECEASED and the calm way she’d talked about the mortality rate among people like the two of us, and I couldn’t blame him. I might want to, but I couldn’t do it.

“Oh,” I said softly. Then: “Neither have I. Before I saw you in the forest, I wasn’t even sure there were others.”

Jeff scoffed. “Of course there are others. That’s how plants work. They drop a million seeds and hope one or two will sprout.”

“Not a million,” I said, unable to stifle the slow twisting feeling in my stomach. Not a million, no, but the logic was sound. What was the point in an invasion that started with only one spy?

Even before I’d seen Jeff—even before I’d seen Toni’s wall—I should have known there would be dozens of us, hundreds, maybe even thousands, scattered all around the world. Because kids die. Not many kids, not even most kids, but still, kids die. They run into traffic or they eat the wrong thing or they catch COVID or the wrong strain of flu. An invasion that could lose whatever advantage we represented because of a bad hamburger was no invasion at all. It was a farce masquerading as a threat, and there was no point to it.

“Not a million,” Jeff agreed. “Still. Lots of us, and I never managed to meet a single one before you flew close enough to my house for me to pick you up. You’re real. You’re real, and that means I’m real, and that means I’m not…” He touched the bandage on his cheek, eyes troubled.

“It means I’m not broken,” he said finally.

“No,” I said softly, and looked out the window at the wooded roadside rolling endlessly by. The trees seemed to go on forever. Maine was a lot like Washington, at least in that way.

There was a scuffle behind us before Toni jammed her head between the seats, looking first at Jeff, then at me. Jeff yelped, grabbing at the wheel as he fought not to lose control. Toni rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be a big baby,” she said. “If you’re all like this, the humans are going to win no problem, and then you’re going to look pretty damn silly. Right before we lock you in some secret government lab and experiment on you for twenty years.”

Jeff stared at her. That seemed somewhat unsafe, given that we were still driving; I reached over and pushed his head gently back toward the road.

“Toni, please don’t antagonize the driver,” I said wearily. “Jeff, this is Antonia Fabris, the astronomer who intercepted the signal from the fleet. She probably knows more about what it can tell us regarding the position and timing of the invasion than anyone else in the world.”

“Also I was nearly assimilated by one of your fucked-up pod flowers and I hate you,” said Toni.

“There’s also that,” I agreed.

Jeff scowled, keeping his eyes on the road. “Then what is she doing in the van?” he demanded. “If she was a failed conversion, there’s no way she’s on our side.”

“I don’t think any sensible human is going to be on your side, Seymour,” said Toni blithely. “I mean, there is a distinct lack of coming in peace in your overall game plan. But see, the human race is not on my side either, because they think there’s something wrong with me, on account I’ve been playing the role of the heroic football quarterback in a nineteen-fifties monster movie for most of my life.”

“ What? ” squawked Jeff.

“Sadly, I understood that,” I said. “She means no one believes her when she says the aliens are coming.”

“Bingo,” said Toni. “And see, if this were a classic creature feature, I’d have a beautiful cheerleader girlfriend to protect and I’d figure out how to defeat you and then you’d go away forever while we made out chastely in front of the chagrined adults. Alas, that is not to be. No one is ever going to believe me, not until you’re here, and if you’re half the invaders I hope you are, you’re not going to be easy to stop once that happens.”

“You just said you hated us.”

“I do,” said Toni blithely. “Thing is, I hate everyone else even more than I hate you. You’re not my own kind. You’re under no obligation whatsoever to be kind to me or take care of me, and they were, or should have been, until they decided I was too damaged to be useful. This isn’t the Victorian era. An asylum wasn’t an option, on account of how at some point we figured out that locking people up and throwing away the key doesn’t work. So they got me an observatory in the middle of nowhere instead, and as long as I keep taking my meds, the checks keep coming, and that should probably be enough, except that it’s not. I hate them for throwing me away. All your people will do is kill me. Somehow, that seems like the better deal.”

“You still released the signal,” I said.

Toni shrugged. “Can’t be the hero of the horror movie if you don’t at least try to alert the authorities. And then run like fuck when they come to make you disappear for the crime of being inconvenient. Where are we going, anyway?”

“Back to the mothership, where we can take you apart to figure out what makes you tick,” deadpanned Jeff.

Toni laughed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll believe it when I see it.” She withdrew, presumably going back to her seat. To be honest, I didn’t care, as long as she wasn’t cramming herself between us and muttering about monsters.

Were we monsters? I didn’t know. I didn’t think of myself as a monster. But Mom, who had never forgotten the day I came out of the woods and told her the aliens had taken her real baby away, might have had something different to say about the issue. A lot of people might have had something different to say.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the pictures on Toni’s wall, all those children and teenagers with pieces of string connecting them to the word “deceased.” We’d been killing people since we got here. I rubbed the inside of my elbow with the heel of my hand, trying to soothe away the last lingering echoes of the itch.

Jeff glanced at me, looking knowingly at my hand. “Itches, doesn’t it?” he asked.

I still couldn’t remember what was underneath that bandage. Only that it was bad, somehow; only that it wasn’t human, or hadn’t been, when recast through the forest’s lens. “It does,” I admitted.

“I think it’s the signal. I think when we hear it, it speeds some things up that were pretty slow before. It’s not going to hurt you. This is what’s supposed to happen.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a flower ate me, and then I couldn’t stop telling people I was an alien invader,” he said matter-of-factly. “Clearly, that sort of compulsion is a ‘supposed-to’ thing, or it wouldn’t have been there. I was supposed to warn everyone I spoke to that the invasion was coming, and I was supposed to do it while I looked just like the kid next door. While I was the kid next door. Now there’s a signal from space, and I recognize it, I know it like I wrote it, and it’s making me itch and doing strange things to my body. So that must be a ‘supposed-to,’ like the compulsion. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Not unless the invaders are totally incompetent.” I made the statement lightly.

There was nothing light in the look Jeff leveled on me. “I don’t think they are. Do you?”

“No,” I admitted, and we drove on in silence, me rubbing the inside of my elbow, the green world rolling by around us.

2.

It took a little over thirty minutes to reach Jeff’s “safe house”: a rickety-looking old colonial home standing in the center of a clearing, surrounded on all sides by trees. There was a detached barn slightly off to one side and behind the main structure. Moss grew green on its roof, and the door stood ajar, allowing me to catch a tempting glimpse of some mysterious machine. Signs were posted along the drive, indicating that we were crossing onto private property, and trespassers would be prosecuted.

“Home sweet home,” said Jeff, parking in front of the house and turning off the engine. Sitting up a little straighter, he called into the back, “We’re here. Don’t touch anything until I’ve turned off the security system, and do not try to walk across the field.”

“Gopher holes?” I asked.

“Sure, if by ‘gopher holes’ you mean ‘land mines,’” he said, and opened the door, sliding out of the van.

I hurried to do the same, careful to keep my feet on the paved drive as I ran around the front of the van to catch up with Jeff. “Land mines?” I demanded. “What the hell do you mean, land mines ?”

“I mean explosive devices primed to explode if someone steps on them,” he said. “Sometimes it rains raccoon in the middle of the night, which is messy, but I know nobody’s going to break in.”

“What the hell ?”

“You just said that,” he said, and glanced meaningfully over his shoulder at the others as they climbed out of the van. “Maybe you should go fill your friends in, before they decide to go for a walk off the beaten path and get themselves a one-way ticket to kingdom come.” Then he strolled toward the porch, leaving me to decide which way to turn.

Graham’s voice drifted around the van, slightly raised in the way I’d come to recognize as uncertainty. He got boisterous when he didn’t know what else to do. A boisterous Graham was a Graham inclined to do big, bold things that made him look confident—like walking into a stranger’s field to poke around for snakes.

I spun on my heel and ran toward the voices. Sure enough, there was Graham, moving toward the edge of the driveway, clearly intending to go on an unchaperoned field trip. I put on an extra burst of speed, grabbing his arm before he could step into the grass. Graham turned to blink at me, surprised.

“Land mines,” I said.

His surprise melted away, replaced first by shock, and then by horror. “ Land mines?” he echoed, at a much higher volume. “Stasia, what the hell?”

“That’s what I said when he told me about them.” I glanced over my shoulder at the house. Jeff was on the porch. He’d produced a tablet, and was typing something out—presumably the code to deactivate the security systems. There must have been more than one. There was no other reason for things to have taken this long.

I looked back to Graham. He was still staring at me. At least he wasn’t trying to pull his arm away. “He’s not a friend. He’s just someone who could get us out of there.”

“That’s not what you said this morning.”

I resisted the urge to look away. “I lied this morning.”

“I figured that out.” The horror slipped out of his eyes, leaving something even more distressing behind: disappointment. “I just can’t figure out exactly why. How do you know this guy?”

The forest. The dreams that weren’t dreams, that were some kind of… what? Neural network generated by people like me who were trying to live among the humans, all while knowing we would never really belong with them? It was as good an answer as any, and it wasn’t a good answer at all.

“I don’t know how to explain,” I said, and watched the storm clouds roll in on Graham’s face like a warning of trouble to come. “Graham…”

“Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and backed off.

In our last year of college, when Graham had finally been able to convince his insurance company to let him start testosterone, he’d lost his temper more than a few times. Not because he wanted to: because his body, after years of dealing with mostly estrogen, didn’t know how to handle the new hormones. They made him angry. They made him impulsive, and rash, and occasionally jealous in a way that frightened me. We’d nearly broken up over his temper, because it scared me and he didn’t know how to control it and no matter how much I loved him, no matter how much I wanted to stand by him, I couldn’t live with the fear that one day he’d punch me instead of the wall.

Instead of breaking up, we had gone to counseling together, offered through our school’s Queer Alliance. They’d taught us about the way some people reacted to hormones, and given us the tools we needed to cope. We had even signed a contract, agreeing that the day either of us struck the other would be the day we separated. Graham had held to it. So had I. And part of holding to it was knowing when to open space between us, to let the anger drain.

Toni and David looked at me, her with interest, him with resignation, like he’d always known his association with her would end in a field full of land mines somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where his body would never be found.

“Lovers’ spat?” asked Toni.

“We’re allowed,” I said.

“See, I think when the fate of the human race hangs in the balance and the police are coming to arrest innocent astronomers for the crime of listening to the music of the spheres, relationship drama should maybe go on a hiatus in favor of not winding up dead,” said Toni. “But what do I know? I’m just the human lady.”

“Graham is human,” I protested.

“But he knows you’re not. That makes him a traitor at best, and a sympathizer at worst.”

“Toni,” said David.

“No.” She shook her head. “People who side with the invaders get to enjoy the full spectrum of shame and disappointment as the aliens ride in and destroy everything humanity has ever worked for. There’s no ‘Oh, he’s a nice guy, it’s not his fault his girlfriend is a face-eater.’ He’s a nice guy. His girlfriend—you—is a face-eater. He gets to live with that.”

“I’ve never eaten a face,” I said.

“Wait for it,” she replied.

I sighed, rubbing the crook of my elbow. I wanted to peel off my sweater and see what it looked like. I was afraid to find out. “Just don’t go into the field, okay? I think Jeff might be your soulmate. He’s super paranoid, and there are land mines in the grass.”

“Huh,” said Toni, with grudging respect. “A man after my own heart.”

“He’s a plant,” I said. “Don’t get too attached.” Then I turned and walked toward the porch.

Jeff was tucking his tablet back into his bag when I walked up, having apparently finished the lengthy process of unlocking the door. He flashed me a tight-lipped smile. “You told them about the land mines?”

“I don’t think they’re too happy with you.”

“That’s fine. I don’t concern myself overly with the happiness of apes. It never ends well for anyone—not me, and not them.” Jeff pulled an ordinary key out of his pocket, sliding it into the deadbolt. “You hungry?”

My stomach rumbled. It had been a long time since breakfast. “I could eat.”

“I’ll make us some scrambled eggs. Come on.” With that, he pushed the door open, and led me into the house.

I’m not sure what I had been expecting. Something desolate and creepy: the kind of place that belonged in a dark, creepy forest, surrounded by land mines and trees. Instead, the foyer was decorated in a clean, minimalist style that could have been stolen from the most recent Hollywood blockbuster. Simple black-and-white photos of forested areas hung on the walls, evenly spaced, so that each of them had to be considered on its own merits. The floor and walls were hardwood, and while they were stained and sealed, nothing was painted.

“It’s all eco-friendly,” said Jeff, looking over his shoulder at me. “I’m off the power grid entirely, thanks to the solar panels on the roof, and I get my water from a natural aquifer. I’m connected to the municipal gas lines and I get my internet from the cable company like everybody else, but that’s it for me and dependence on the local grid. If I had to, I could stay out here for six months at a stretch without needing to pay a bill or see an inspector. It’s a pretty sweet gig.”

“Where are your parents?”

His shrug was fluid. “Ultimatum when I turned sixteen: stop telling everyone I was an alien, or find someplace else to live. You know how that story ends.”

“Yeah. I do.” No one can be ordered out of a compulsion; that’s not how compulsions work. If it were, there would be a lot fewer compulsive people in the world. So his parents had told him to stop or get out, and he’d gotten out. I would have done the same thing in his situation. I sort of had: my mother never quite said I needed to change my song or leave her home, but she’d implied it. She’d whispered it when she didn’t think I was listening, trying to convince my grandparents this was “tough love.” Like the way to make me normal was to forbid me to be strange.

Luckily for me, my grandparents had been having none of that bullshit, and as long as they’d been alive, I’d had a room in their house. Once they’d passed away, I had taken the last of my stuff from their attic and bid my childhood home a sad farewell. Mom would probably have allowed me to live there for at least a little while, but some fights aren’t worth having. Some fights just need to be walked away from.

“Anyway, it’s not like I was going to be able to save them when the invasion came, so it’s probably for the best that they made it clear where their allegiances were.” Jeff looked at me levelly. “Don’t you think it’s best if we don’t struggle to save people who have already been lost?”

I thought about Graham and the others, standing outside, trying to compose themselves after fleeing from the police. I thought about the look on Graham’s face when I’d said the words “land mines.”

“I don’t think anyone is already lost,” I said softly.

Jeff didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.

The house was warm and quiet, and most of all, safe. It felt like nothing bad could ever happen here, like I could lock the door and sit down on the couch with a cup of hot tea and wait out the apocalypse.

“I wanted to… I mean, I don’t know… I mean…” I stopped, rubbing the inside of my elbow again before I said, in a small voice, “I don’t know what’s under that bandage, but I wish you’d show me.”

“Maybe I cut myself shaving.”

“That isn’t what it was in the forest last night.”

The corner of Jeff’s mouth twitched. “There you go. You’re admitting it.”

“Admitting what?”

“That we”—he moved a finger back and forth between us, pointing to each of us in turn—“are connected. We’re the same. We’re on the right side of this invasion.”

I frowned. I wasn’t ready to commit to our side being the “right” side—not yet. Not until I knew what we were coming here to do. I didn’t think we were coming in peace, but I had been wrong before, and I could hope. I could hope there was a way this ended well for everyone, for me and for Graham and even for people like my mother or Jeff’s parents. The humans had been here first. They deserved to keep their world.

Or did they? The whisper was sweet, insinuating itself into my thoughts as smoothly as a worm slides into the soil. The humans had done nothing to keep their planet safe. They hadn’t put up orbital defense stations, hadn’t learned to protect themselves from asteroids—hadn’t even listened when the scouts of another world’s army started loudly announcing themselves. We had never been subtle. But we had been laughed at.

“It’s all right,” said Jeff. He reached for the bandage, beginning to peel back the tape. “You don’t have to know what you want yet. You’re still figuring yourself out, and that’s cool. That just means you’re going to be real sure when you finally believe. You’re going to be a juggernaut.”

“How are you sure already?” I asked. “You know as much as I do.”

“Like I said, I’m in computers. I like to understand things. I started digging a long time ago, looking for the holes that fit us. I found a lot more than most people. More than a human could ever have pieced together, that’s for damn sure. Did you know we’re not alone? I mean, literally. There have been earlier waves, although they were never quite as dense as ours. I think there might be people like us in their eighties, still wandering along, waiting for an invasion they don’t believe is ever coming. Can you imagine? Getting old waiting to be needed, and then turning around and realizing there’s a line of people behind you young and strong enough to do what needs to be done? It’s got to be breaking their hearts.”

He pulled the last of the tape off the edge of the bandage and rolled it down, revealing the skin beneath. My breath caught in my throat and my heart stopped in my chest, leaving an aching stillness inside me. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It didn’t even feel all that uncomfortable. It was like a system had gone offline, something unnecessary but convenient, and the rest of me was adjusting to its absence.

The skin on Jeff’s cheek had been ripped cleanly away, leaving thin, jagged edges to outline the wound. They were translucent in places, like they were being slowly worn away.

The wound itself was not a wound, not exactly: it was a patch of skin as green as maple leaves in the spring. Thin lines ran through it, sketched in darker green, like the veins on those same leaves. I made a soft sound of protest and dismay. Jeff smiled, a little ruefully.

“I heard the signal,” he said. “The next day, I was fixing a solar panel on the roof when I slipped and scraped my cheek. Pretty standard… except this time, the scrape didn’t heal. Instead, the skin started to die and peel off, and this was what was underneath.”

“Was that always there?” My voice barely crested above a whisper. I couldn’t take my eyes off that torn place, that green place.

My future.

“It can’t have been,” he said. “I grew up a normal kid, you know? The ‘I am from space’ stuff didn’t even bother people until I was like, nine. I skinned my knees. I saw the dentist. I got sick, I got better, I did the stuff kids are supposed to do. If I’d been green inside, somebody would have noticed. Didn’t you ever go to the hospital?”

Mutely, I nodded. Pneumonia when I was eight; a broken ankle when I was eleven. X-rays and antibiotics and human systems functioning and breaking down in human ways. None of this smooth greenness. None of this impossibility.

“I think it started growing when the signal played. Like we had to hear it for it to take hold of us.” Jeff glanced at the door as he taped his bandage back into place, checking that we were still alone before he nodded toward my elbow. “It still itches?”

It took me a moment to remember that he’d seen me scratching at it in the forest, where I had looked under his bandage for the first time. Only it hadn’t been smooth green skin there, had it? It had been something else, something even less human. Something that could never have been concealed under a simple sheet of taped-down gauze. I couldn’t quite remember what I’d seen—it slipped away whenever I grabbed for it, like my subconscious understood that I wasn’t prepared for the truth—and yet I knew it had been impossible.

“Yeah,” I said softly.

“Is he going to stand with you when the skin tears?”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it. Jeff smirked, and somehow that was the last straw. I took a step toward him, hands balled into fists, fury in my eyes. To my immense satisfaction, he took a step back.

“Graham is none of your concern,” I snapped. “Be as smug as you like. Be as confident in our victory as you want, but be assured, I will protect what’s mine, and I will see them through to the end of this invasion. Do not touch them. Do you understand me?”

“I didn’t threaten your people.”

“You were going to. It goes from ‘They’re useless’ to ‘They’re dangerous’ to ‘Get rid of them.’ You think I don’t understand how this sort of thing works? I come from the same vine you do. I am grateful you got us out of there. I would like to know someone who is like me and understands what’s about to happen. But if you lay one finger on anyone I have claimed as my own, we’re done. Do you understand?”

“Heh,” he said, taking another step back. “Has anyone ever told you you’re scary as hell when you want to be?”

“Lots of people. I’m in customer service.”

The sound of the door opening pulled us both from the conversation. We turned. The others had worked up the courage to walk along the pavement, where the land mines weren’t, and were stepping inside. As they did, they looked around with a familiar wide-eyed curiosity. Toni and David hung back, apparently studying the material used to construct the walls. Graham moved away from them, hurrying over to me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied. “Feeling better?”

“Not really, but I’m feeling less irrational, and I’ll take it.” He turned to Jeff. “I didn’t thank you for bringing us to your home. It was extremely decent of you. So thank you. Now what the fuck do you think you’re playing at, putting live land mines in your yard?”

“How are you so sure they’re live?” asked Jeff. “I didn’t hear anything explode.”

“I’m taking your word for it,” Graham said. “If I can believe my girlfriend is a plant from space, I can believe you’re enough of an asshole to set land mines. Which are totally illegal, by the way. You could go to prison for a long, long time.”

“Since I just saved you from getting your ass disappeared to an unmarked government facility for the foreseeable future, how about we call it even?” Jeff folded his arms. “I have land mines because I am the vanguard of an invading species of alien plants, and I didn’t feel like getting dissected in the middle of the night. The land mines are illegal. They also keep people from dropping by uninvited and taking me away.”

“Now that’s a kind of alien abduction we don’t hear about all the time,” said Toni blithely, strolling over to join us. She looked Jeff up and down. “I don’t know you.”

“Okay,” said Jeff.

“You don’t understand. I know all of you in this area. I have pictures. I know where the bodies are buried. How come I don’t know you?”

“My flower bloomed on Oahu, if that helps.” Jeff shrugged. “I moved here to be isolated.”

Toni’s smile was brilliant. “Of course it bloomed on Oahu. That makes total sense. Volcanic ash must have been amazing for the growth cycle, and anyway, I knew you couldn’t be local.”

“I’m local now,” said Jeff. “What the hell do you mean, you know where the bodies are buried?”

“Metaphorically speaking,” said Toni. “I know how many of you come from around here. I even know where most of you are. I lost track of three kids when their parents moved them across the country before they were eighteen. My PIs found two of them, but the third is still a mystery. I think he’s somewhere in Utah, if he’s still alive. That’s always the big question.”

“What are you talking about?” Jeff looked at me. “What is she talking about?”

“Toni met one of the seeding flowers when she was a kid,” I said. “It tried to absorb her. It didn’t succeed.”

“I was too tough to eat,” said Toni, smiling sweetly. “Now you vegetable motherfuckers get to deal with your worst fear: a scientist who knows where the weed killer is.”

“And we got her out of the observatory because why, exactly?” asked Jeff.

“Because she’s the one who recorded and released the signal,” I said. “She can help us learn more about it.”

“Or she can lie to us about its composition and make sure we’re not properly prepared to do what comes next,” snapped Jeff.

“Do you know what that is?” The question came from an unexpected source: Graham. We turned slowly toward him, my heart sinking as I realized I had all but forgotten he was there in my focus on Jeff and Toni’s debate. He was my boyfriend and I loved him. I was ready to defend him from the coming invasion, no matter what that defense entailed… and I had already forgotten he was there.

Jeff frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know what comes next?” Graham moved closer to me, putting a hand on my shoulder, making it impossible to forget him again. I leaned into it, feeling grateful and sick to my stomach at the same time. Everything was shifting so fast.

My elbow still itched. The memory of green tugged at the edges of my awareness, refusing to be ignored, and I was afraid.

“No.” Jeff shook his head, frustration clear in his expression. “I don’t have a damn clue what comes next. I didn’t even know the invasion was coming until I heard that signal.”

“Maybe I faked it,” said Toni tauntingly.

“You didn’t fake it,” I said, before I could think better. Everyone turned to look at me. I didn’t squirm. I stood a little straighter, lifting my chin, and said, “I don’t know what it says, but I under stand it. There’s no way you could have done that good a job faking something you’ve never heard before. It’s real. They’re coming.”

“And the police have taken the observatory,” said David bleakly. “What do we do now?”

“You come back to Washington with us.” I looked at Graham, and smiled, just a little, when I saw him nod. Returning my attention to the others, I said, “There’s room. Between his place and mine, there’s room. We can work on this together.”

“Why should I leave?” asked Jeff. “Why shouldn’t you stay here?”

“Because cultural literacy is part of why we bloomed here,” I said, and was gratified by the way his eyes widened, ever so slightly. “See? You feel it too. You’ve isolated yourself. Maybe that’s what you had to do in order to survive, but it isn’t going to make you as useful as you could be. As they’re going to want you to be.”

“And David and I?” asked Toni. “I’ve already told you I’m not going to be your ally. We’ll work against you.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, that’s how it goes, right? We don’t have an observatory for you. We don’t have the police on our doorstep either—not yet, anyway—and since I’m a homegrown crank, we’ll probably have some time. You can analyze the signal. You can try to find a way to stop us. One of us will have to succeed before the other, but that’s what it takes to be the hero of that horror movie, right?”

“I think it’s more of a creature feature, but you make a good point,” said Toni, with a glance at David. “I can make a few calls. Get the things we need delivered to the airport without involving the local authorities.”

“Won’t they just, I don’t know, arrest us at the airport?” asked David. “The TSA could disappear us forever without thinking about it twice.”

“But they won’t,” said Toni. “They like to have cause. They like to be able to say, ‘This is why we did this thing, and if you’re not careful, we’ll do it to you.’”

I thought about my own fears on the flight here, and said nothing. David was right. If the TSA decided to get involved, there was nothing we could do. But we couldn’t stay here, and it wasn’t like the trains were any safer, not since the powers of the TSA had been expanded to cover them as well as air travel. Taking the train just made it more likely that we’d disappear somewhere in the middle of the country, vanishing into a private government facility that might never let us out again. At least if we were on a plane, they’d have fewer options to snatch us.

Toni might like that. Then again, she might not. She had come close enough to assimilation that there was a chance the people who decided to organize against the invasion—assuming they did so in time—would decide she was on our side and not humanity’s.

Sides. It all came down to drawing sides.

I slipped my hand into Graham’s, holding tight, holding fast despite everything that was ahead of us. If I drew a side, I was going to make sure my friends were standing on it with me. That mattered more than planet, more than species, more than anything.

“So,” I said, and my voice was strong and steady. I was proud that it belonged to me. That was the voice of a woman who could survive an alien invasion, and see her people safely to the other side. “Do you have a guest room?”