Page 16 of Overgrowth

Tucson, Arizona: July 21, 2031

Seventeen days pre-invasion

1.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Some of you may have noticed that we’re a little off-course. We have been diverted to Tucson due to an equipment problem. We’ll have this taken care of and get you back in the air as quickly as possible. My apologies for the inconvenience.”

Our plane, filled with weary travelers, emitted a collective mumbling groan. Some people had been asleep until the loudspeaker’s announcement. Others were trying to focus on their tablets, their books, anything to keep them from remembering where they really were, and being jerked back into the harsh reality of air travel was not comforting to them.

Toni, nestled against David’s side in the row across from ours, continued her open-mouthed snoring, even as David blinked blearily at the speakers. “What the hell?” he mumbled, just loud enough for me to hear. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“If we’re making a landing for a technical issue, it shouldn’t be in Tucson. That’s entirely in the wrong direction.”

“Maybe there’s a flying unicorn outside, and the pilot’s changing course to keep it from being sucked into the engine. Now shut up so I can get some goddamn sleep, ” muttered Jeff, not opening his eyes.

I had been sandwiched between him and Graham since we boarded. I wasn’t sure exactly how Toni had been able to seat us all together and get an open middle seat on her side of the plane, but I was willing to bet her credit cards and family fortune had a lot to do with it. Why fly first class when you can just as easily annoy your alien acquaintances in coach?

Graham didn’t say anything. His eyes were open and alert, and he was eyeing the speakers with the wariness of a man who knew nothing good could come of a mid-flight announcement dripping with that much tension.

“Folks, I apologize, but it seems we’ve developed a small problem with one of our fuel couplings, and will be making an unscheduled landing in Tucson,” continued the captain. “It’s nothing to be alarmed about, and you’ll be compensated for your time with a drink on us as soon as we’re back in the air. We expect to be on the ground for thirty minutes tops while our engineering team does a quick but thorough repair, and then it’s back in the air and on to Seattle.”

The murmurs of irritation had been replaced by murmurs of alarm. Graham’s hand clamped down on mine, suddenly squeezing hard enough to hurt. I glanced at him. He was still staring at the speaker, face white.

“What?” I asked, keeping my voice as low as I could. Jeff could hear me—he was leaning close to make sure of it—but I was reasonably sure we wouldn’t be overheard by anyone else. That was one of my favorite things about air travel, the way flying in a giant white-noise machine provided a sliver of privacy in what was really a very public place.

“That’s not how airplanes work,” Graham murmured.

“How would you know?” asked Jeff. “I thought you were a snake scientist.”

“I am,” said Graham. “That means I know a lot of people with private planes, who use those private planes to fly me to the middle of nowhere to look at rare or difficult to locate snakes. No one is that calm about a problem with the fuel. Not even a commercial air pilot, and part of their pay is based on their ability not to panic passengers. Did you hear his voice? No waver. No fear. Irritation and confusion, but that was not the voice of a man who’s afraid his engine is about to run out of gas. He’s setting down for another reason.”

“Why?” asked Jeff.

“Why do you think?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Because of us. It’s the same damn problem as the trains. We just got here faster.”

“And more publicly,” said Graham. “When they come to take us off the plane, don’t resist—resistance only gets you hurt—but be loud. Demand to know why they’re doing this. Yell about your rights, about the fact that you’re an American citizen. Get people filming the incident. That’s not going to save us right away, maybe not ever, but at least the people who care about us will be aware that we’re gone.”

I didn’t say anything. I sank back in my seat and closed my eyes, feeling the plane tilt around me as it entered its initial descent, and wondering how the hell we’d ended up here.

Our trip from Jeff’s house to the hotel had been easy enough: despite our fears, there were no officers waiting on the road to start a car chase, or stationed in the hotel parking lot to arrest us. No one had said a word as we’d walked across the lobby in our little group of five, headed up to our rooms, and collected our things. Going back had been a calculated risk, part bravado and part necessity. We didn’t want to be scared away from our luggage—and more, we needed to know how deep the hot water really was. In the absence of an arrest, we’d assumed we were in the clear.

Getting into the airport had been just as easy. Graham had called for a ride while Jeff hid his van in the woods behind the hotel, where it might be found tomorrow and it might be found never, but either way, it wouldn’t be in the parking lot attracting attention. Confirmation numbers in hand, we’d sailed through security, answering the intrusive questions from the TSA and smiling, smiling, smiling until our faces hurt. Smiling like we weren’t terrified, like there wasn’t a patch of dark green skin on my arm, hidden under the sleeve of my sweater, but there, marking me finally and immutably as what I had always claimed to be.

I was an alien. I was not of this world. And one way or another, I was going to have to reconcile that with a lifetime lived among these people, who had been my friends and my family and my home. For the moment, however, I couldn’t focus on that. I needed to focus on getting home, back to Lucas and Mandy and Seymour, who was only a cat and couldn’t understand any of this.

Jeff had gotten it worse than I had with the TSA. I looked white, even if I was a vegetable, and I was better at smiling like nothing was wrong, while he was a surly Asian American man with a bandage on his cheek. There had been a moment where I’d been sure the TSA agent was about to ask him for a doctor’s note clearing him to fly, but then Toni had blown him a kiss and called him “darling” in a voice like treacle, and suddenly we’d been in the clear. It was almost offensive, seeing the power of the white woman at work. We might have to live with misogyny and the patriarchy and all that fun bullshit, but because we’d been placed on such a high pedestal of purity and innocence, our approval could take a dangerous fellow and turn him into a nice guy.

It was another form of oppression. How else could people say that women only wanted to reform bad boys, if they didn’t set us up to do it all the fucking time? But in that moment, even as I prickled, I was grateful. Without Toni’s intervention, we might not have been able to get Jeff onto the plane.

That didn’t seem like such a good thing anymore. We were descending steadily, moving toward an uncertain and unfriendly future. Toni was still snoring away. That might be for the best. There was a chance, however small, that she could escape notice if she didn’t seem to be too unsettled.

Assuming David didn’t blow it for the both of them. He was looking increasingly agitated. As I watched, he moved to shake her shoulder. I caught his eye and shook my head, motioning for him to leave her alone. There was a pause as he realized what I meant, and he settled in his seat, waiting for the inevitable.

I sort of envied Toni. Neither Graham nor I had gotten much sleep. We hadn’t been talking or having sex or anything fun like that; we’d just been lying side by side, listening to the night pass by around us, neither of us sure how to start the conversation we needed to be having. He was dealing with the fact that I wasn’t human. That couldn’t have been easy. I was dealing with the same thing, but also with the fact that on some level, he’d never really believed I was what I said I was. I had never doubted him when he told me about himself, and he hadn’t believed me. Not entirely.

It wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t even in the neighborhood of being the same thing. It felt like the same thing, and it ached like the same thing, and that made it close enough to hurt.

The plane kept descending, the discontented murmurs of our fellow passengers growing ever more pronounced. Graham gripped my hand, anchoring me in the moment.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’m sure whatever this is, it’s just a misunderstanding. We’ll be able to clear it all up and get on our way.”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure, but if this was helping him, I wasn’t going to argue.

The sky outside the window disappeared, replaced first by a thick layer of clouds, and then by the rapidly looming Arizona desert. The airport was a gray concrete smear across the landscape, penned in by mountains and surrounded by the glittering glass of the city. I’d never been to Arizona before. As a Washington girl, I don’t like that kind of heat, and as a vegetable in human disguise, I don’t like that degree of dryness. It had never seemed like a good place for me.

How right I’d been.

“Flight attendants, please take your seats for landing,” said the captain. The helpful men and women who’d been keeping us happy and calm since takeoff disappeared, and the plane angled even more aggressively downward, slicing off the last few meters of sky—the last few meters of safety—in its bid for the ground. Graham squeezed my hand. I closed my eyes.

Because I hadn’t slept last night, I hadn’t been able to return to the forest. Maybe that was a good thing. Jeff and I had both started experiencing physical changes, but his had followed the signal, while mine had followed our meeting in the forest. Maybe staying out of it was the key to staying as human as possible, for as long as possible. Not forever—I already knew that was beyond me—but for a while. Long enough to figure out what came next.

It was a foolish quest. The forest came for me when I slept; it always had. I could no more order it to stay away than I could decide “Well, this was fun, but I don’t want to be an alien invader anymore, I want to be a human girl again for the first time, so can we get on that?” But it was something to focus on apart from the fact that we were probably all… about to…

I opened my eyes and dug my phone out of my pocket, pressing the button to turn it back on. Graham turned to blink at me.

“We’re supposed to keep those off until—”

“I am aware,” I snapped, shaking the little device as if that would speed the boot-up process in some intangible but essential way. The plane was dropping lower and lower. The flight attendants were seated—good, they couldn’t make me put the phone away—but that meant we didn’t have much time. “Why the hell do phones take so long to start?”

“Because they’re tiny computers,” said Jeff. “You’re holding more processing power than NASA had when they put John Glenn into orbit.”

The urge to turn and glare at him was strong, and it might have been relaxing, under other circumstances. Glaring at people who stay stupid, pedantic shit is practically one of my hobbies. At the moment, I had more important things to worry about.

The screen lit up, the phone’s logo flashing for a second before it was replaced by my lock screen: a picture of my cat on Graham’s chest. Graham was barely visible behind the mound of black-and-white fur, and they both had their eyes closed. It was one of my favorite moments ever, and I normally loved that I got to look at it every day. This time, I swept it aside with a swipe of my thumb, bringing up a text window.

We were too high to have service. That would stop soon. Selecting Mandy’s number, I began composing my message.

Mandy. About to be detained by law enforcement in Arizona. Tell Luke. If not home by end of week, tell EVERYONE. We have done nothing wrong. We are being held against our will.

Maybe it wasn’t true that we’d done nothing wrong. I started my time on this planet by devouring and replacing a little girl, after all. But I’d been a different creature when I’d done that, and I’d sprouted on American soil. Didn’t that make me a citizen? I still had rights. I still deserved better than to disappear into a lab somewhere while the invasion crept ever-closer and no one took care of the people I needed to protect.

I pressed Send, trusting the network to deliver my message as soon as we landed. Then I hesitated, and started again.

I know this is all v/scary, and probably pretty confusing. I will explain everything when we make it home. I will keep you safe. Please feed my cat, and can you go to Graham’s to feed his mean lizard? Not even an iguana deserves to starve to death. I love you more than you will ever know.

Again I hit Send, this time lowering my phone. I leaned until my head was resting against Graham’s shoulder, and closed my eyes. It was out of our hands at this point. Out of my hands.

It was time to let gravity take us.