Page 15 of Overgrowth
Jeff had three guest rooms, part and parcel of his ridiculously oversized house. I wasn’t sure why someone with such an attraction to solitude would want to have that many extra beds, but I also wasn’t going to argue with it. Not when it gave us a place to spend the night.
Toni and David were bedding down together, in the room closest to the front door, as if needing to run a little less to reach the door if Jeff and I decided to move on to human experimentation in the night was the solution to all their problems. I still wasn’t sure what their relationship was—friends, lovers, or simply very close colleagues—but it didn’t really matter, because Graham and I were, for the first time since leaving our hotel, finally alone.
Jeff had produced toothbrushes and toothpaste from a stockpile that looked like something from a survivalist compound, only grunting when I’d asked him why he had so many. He seemed like a very lonely man. Maybe that was explanation enough for why he’d tracked me down after meeting me in the forest: he was alone, and he wanted to find his own kind. The urge had to have an urgency for him that didn’t exist for me.
Not yet, anyway.
I sat on the edge of the futon that was going to be our home for the night, my sweater still on and my hand clamped over the bend of my elbow, like I could somehow force the world to take it back—to take it all back, all the way to the moment when Anastasia Miller had wandered into the woods and met the pretty flower that would steal her life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to exist. It was just that I wanted this all to have been easier. I wanted to have been one thing from birth until now, with no question of where my loyalties were going to go.
Graham stepped out of his trousers, leaving himself clad in nothing but his boxer shorts, and turned, looking slightly nonplussed to find me still fully clothed. “Stasia? Is everything all right?”
No. Nothing was all right. It was possible nothing was going to be all right ever again: that we had passed the last moment of normalcy sometime in the past few weeks, and now it was gone forever. Biting my lip, I shook my head.
Graham frowned. He walked over and sat beside me, reaching for my hand. His frown deepened when it remained clamped over the bend of my elbow, unyielding. “Hey. What is it? Can I help? I’m sorry it’s not safe to go back to the hotel. But we’ll be able to change our clothes before the flight.”
The idea that this might be about something as pedestrian as clean underwear was almost enough to make me start laughing. The only reason I was able to resist was that I knew if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I’d laugh and laugh as the world fell down around us, and I wouldn’t be able to save anyone. Not even Graham.
Not even myself.
“I need to show you something,” I said, voice carefully level, “and I need you to promise me you won’t freak out about it. Can you do that?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“ Can you do that? ” My voice was ice eating away at a sapling’s roots, harsh and cold and unforgiving. Graham froze, leaning back to look at me with wide, startled eyes.
His beard was coming in the patchy way it always did, making his cheeks look like they’d been half-plucked by some rogue beautician. He was a little flushed, making the scars on his chest stand out white against the red, and he had never been so handsome, and I had never loved him more. This could be the moment when I lost him. Because I had always believed him when he told me he was a man, and we had always pretended his belief in me was the same thing, but it wasn’t, was it? It wasn’t the same thing at all. Gender was a social construct and a part of the soul, and humans had always been capable of getting it wrong. I, though…
I was something alien and new, and while we had built a relationship on believing each other, our secrets weren’t the same at all.
“Okay,” he said, in a hushed voice. “I won’t freak out.”
It was an impossible promise. It still made me feel better, enough that I could whisper, “Close your eyes.”
He closed his eyes. I peeled off my sweater, dropping it on the floor before allowing myself to look down at the bend of my elbow, at the place that had started itching in an impossible forest.
The skin was torn. The edges were red and raw, and probably should have hurt me, all things considered. There was no blood, but there was a small amount of cloudy fluid, like sap leaking from the torn leaf of a bush. Where the skin had been, where the skin had ripped away, there was…
There was…
It was still skin. I touched it gingerly with the tip of one finger, and I felt the contact exactly like I expected I would. There were even tiny hairs there, filaments that probably served some biological purpose, mammalian or not. It was a small tear. If not for the color, it would have looked human.
I was a deeper shade of green than Jeff was, less tropical and more Pacific Northwest. I was the color of pine needles, of evergreens, of places where the snow was never quite strong enough to conquer the trees. I touched the patch of alien skin again. It was mine. It was me. I had always been telling the truth. I had never, despite the cries of parents and classmates, been crazy.
“You can open your eyes now,” I said softly, pulling my hand away and extending my arm, giving Graham the clearest view possible. This was his moment. If he wanted to run, if he wanted to turn against me, this was his moment.
He opened his eyes and looked at my arm. For a long time, he didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Finally, he took a breath.
“Is that makeup?” he asked. “Is this a joke?”
“No.”
“Is it a bruise? A really… a really strange bruise?”
“No.”
“Can I touch it?”
Graham had touched every inch of my body during our time together, had scoured my skin with fingers and tongue. If I had ever turned green before this, he would have known before I did, teasing the taste of chlorophyll from my flesh. Maybe that was why I nodded acquiescence and held my arm out toward him, allowing him to reach for me.
His fingertips were gentle as they brushed against my tender new skin, and the tiny hairs that might not be hairs at all stood on end at the sensation. He paused before running a single finger over my skin a second time, focusing on the hairs. They bent under the pressure, springing back up when it was taken away.
“It’s real,” he said softly. He looked up, meeting my eyes, and only the fact that he didn’t flinch away kept me from crying. “You were telling the truth. This whole time, you were telling the truth.”
“Yes,” I said.
“The invasion is coming.”
“Yes.”
“Can we stop it?”
“No.”
“Can we survive it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and the tears finally came, rolling down my cheeks in slow lines. Graham put his arms around me, and held me, and if he noticed that my tears were thicker than they should have been, he didn’t say a word.
Neither of us did, as all around us, the night—one of the last nights of a free and human world—went on.