Page 18 of Overgrowth

When I opened my eyes again, I was alone in a small room with gunmetal gray walls. My clothes were gone, replaced by pale green hospital scrubs. The inside of my mouth tasted like wheatgrass and blood, like I’d been chewing on my own tongue and trying to rinse the taste away at a trendy juice bar. I blinked at the ceiling a few times, feeling the thin cot beneath me shift with my renewed motion.

Alone. Clothes. Room.

Wait.

Cautiously, in case I could buy myself a few minutes by seeming to still be asleep, I reached around and felt my left arm. There was a bandage there, taped flush against my skin. It wasn’t the one I’d put on before leaving Jeff’s house. I closed my eyes, too slowly to stop the first hot tears from escaping and trickling down the sides of my face. They knew. These people, whoever they were, whatever government agency they worked for, they knew.

It was almost too bad they hadn’t decided to ground our plane in New Mexico. At least then Toni could have been held at Area 51. It would have done her conspiracy-loving heart good to become part of one of the biggest, stupidest conspiracy theories in the world.

There was a click. The world outside my eyelids brightened as the lights came on. I didn’t open my eyes.

“Miss Miller, if you would please acknowledge us, this could all go considerably faster.” The voice belonged to the woman from the plane. I kept my eyes shut.

She sighed. “I don’t know what sort of situation you believe yourself to have fallen into, but I assure you this is serious, and you can go a long way toward keeping yourself and your companions safe by choosing to cooperate. This is a matter of national security.” She paused, chuckling grimly before she said, “Or perhaps I should say this is a matter of global security. Do you think that might be more accurate, Miss Miller?”

I didn’t move.

“Perhaps you’re under the mistaken assumption that you can somehow, shall we say, wait me out. That if you’re patient, I will go away. You’re entirely wrong about that. I have all the time in the world to get you talking.”

That wasn’t true. If she knew what I was, and if she knew what the signal was, she knew the invasion was coming. Her time was limited. She might not know how limited, but she knew it was running out. She couldn’t toy with me forever.

“Your companions are human, Miss Miller. Of course, you knew that. The little one has been talking nonstop. She seems to feel like we’ve lent her validity by taking her from the plane, that we have to listen to her and involve her in our decision-making. All because she pointed a satellite dish at the wrong sector of the sky.” The disgust in the woman’s voice was palpable. “She did no one any favors with that little trick. She’s brought us to the verge of a national panic, and for what? She knows nothing about their ships, about their armaments. She shouted ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, and now she wants us to reward her for it.”

The urge to defend Toni tickled the edges of my mind. That was definitely something I’d picked up from humanity: the quick assimilation of people into the category I considered “mine.” I wouldn’t save her over Graham, or Mandy, or even Lucas’s obnoxious girlfriend, but I would still take her side over this stranger, who had pulled me off my plane and prevented me from getting home.

The woman sighed. “Miss Miller, all I’m asking here is for you to be reasonable. I’ve been reasonable. You’re unrestrained. You’re covered. You have freedom of motion within the confines of your cell. I’m sure you’re saying to yourself that you’re an American citizen; you have rights. But I ask you, is a dog an American citizen? Is a redwood tree? Yes, they can be protected, but they can’t hold citizenship. That privilege, I’m afraid, is reserved for the human. ”

Her voice dipped on the last word, turning venomous and cold and making it clear exactly how carefully she had been speaking before that moment. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

I’d considered what it would mean to choose humanity over my own kind, or to choose my own kind over the people who’d raised me. I had never considered whether it was possible that the nature of my “birth” could mean that I had no rights.

“That one bothered you, didn’t it?” The warm, harried bureaucrat was back. “Had you not realized your origins would make you ineligible for birthright citizenship? Oh, dear. I’m so sorry to have caused you distress. Perhaps you could open your eyes, and we could engage in this conversation in a civilized manner.”

“Where are my friends?” My eyes stayed closed. That much, at least, I could do.

It didn’t seem to bother my captor. She sounded positively delighted as she said, “You’re awake! Oh, this is excellent. Are you ready to discuss the situation with me, or are you going to continue to be obstinate?”

“How can I be obstinate when I’m unconscious?”

“Our scientists have been waiting for you to wake up for several hours.”

The thought that they’d waited to take whatever samples they thought were necessary until I woke up should have been soothing. Instead, it raised questions of pain-tolerance tests, and other things that would require me to cooperate.

“They can keep waiting,” I said. “I do not consent to any medical testing.”

“Miss Miller, you are here in the presence of three American citizens. All of them are human. We are very acquainted with damaging the human body without leaving permanent marks. What do you think would happen to your friends if we lowered the temperature in their cells? Or if we withheld their medications? Technically, refusing to provide access to antipsychotics and artificial hormones is legal. It’s not even torture. It’s simply a termination of unnecessary medical treatment.”

I didn’t know whether it was Toni or David on the antipsychotics, and honestly, I didn’t care. It would be torture either way, no matter what the law had to say about it. I opened my eyes, sitting up and looking around the gunmetal gray room. There were no windows. There wasn’t even a mirror, which I could believably have taken for two-way. There were just the walls, smooth and metallic and unrelenting.

“There,” said the woman. Her voice came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. “Wasn’t that easy? If you cooperate, we don’t harm your friends. We don’t want to hurt them, you understand. Unlike you, they’re American citizens, and people saw them taken into custody. If we harm them, we’ll have to deal with the consequences, and we would really rather not.”

“So let us go,” I said.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Are you from outer space, Miss Miller?”

“I am the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people,” I said automatically. I clapped my hand over my mouth as soon as the last word was out, but it was too late: the damage was done.

“You all say that,” said the woman. “Every single one of you that we’ve been able to locate, worldwide, has said that exact sentence in whatever local language they were raised to. We’ve located members of your species on every continent capable of supporting human life. We’ve found you in places we would never have considered to be of tactical or military significance, and you all say the same thing. Why?”

“I don’t know.” Honesty seemed like the best approach, in part because it was all I had. “I can’t stop myself when someone asks the question. Sometimes even when they don’t ask the question. It just comes out.”

“Interesting, isn’t it? That your species would go to all the trouble of sending you here, equipping you to blend in with the locals—with us—and then make it impossible for you to endure any degree of scrutiny without revealing yourself. Don’t you think there’s something contradictory about the whole situation?”

This wasn’t a question I was compelled to answer, and so I didn’t. My silence felt like defiance, and defiance felt good.

The woman sighed. “Don’t you feel any loyalty for the nation—for the planet —that raised you? That gave you everything you needed to succeed? These aliens dropped you here like you didn’t matter. They programmed you to reveal yourself to the most casual questioning. You don’t have any weapons. You don’t have any defenses apart from a camouflage that’s already started to fail. Why would you choose them over us?”

“Well, for a start, they didn’t pull me off a plane in front of a hundred witnesses and lock me in a cell with no windows so they could lecture me about how I’m not a citizen,” I said. “Where are my friends?”

“The little one is selling you out as fast as her mouth allows.”

“You already told me you’re not going to listen to her. Where are my friends?”

“You have a very one-track mind.”

“So far, you’ve threatened me indirectly, and threatened to withhold Graham’s hormones,” I snapped. “My one-track mind is focused on their safety.” And, on some level, on the idea that if I could keep her talking, she couldn’t do anything else. She would have to stay here, talking to me, until she convinced me to reveal… whatever it was she thought I was going to reveal. Some grand invasion scheme. Some details about my species. Something.

There were details about my species contained in this room, details not even I knew about. All they had to do was take their argument that I was not a citizen to its logical conclusion, and cut me open. They could probably learn more about the coming invasion from the structure of my lungs and the tensile strength of my bones than they could from talking to me, no matter how endlessly they chose to do so.

I couldn’t stop that from happening. All I could do was continue buying time, and hope that someone—Graham, or Mandy, or the strangers from the plane—would come up with a way to get us out of here.

“What if I guaranteed their safety—what if I was willing to sign a contract promising they would not, under any circumstances, be harmed while in our custody—in exchange for your cooperation?” The woman’s voice dropped half an octave, becoming cajoling, almost conspiratorial. “They don’t know anything, apart from ‘you exist,’ and honestly, everyone is about to know that. We could even release them, if it meant you would allow us to perform the necessary tests.”

“You’re going to do those anyway.”

“Yes.” There was no shame or hesitation in her declaration: she had a job to do, and she was going to do it, regardless of my feelings on the matter. “But your cooperation would make things substantially easier. Anyone can vivisect an unwilling subject. Studying a willing one is much more profitable.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the person in charge of your case.”

“Are you CIA? FBI? From some other agency that handles contact with alien races?”

Her laughter was low, and surprisingly sincere. “Believe it or not, your kind are the first actual aliens we’ve encountered. Oh, we’ve been watching the sky for decades, but either life is scarcer in the stars than anyone guessed, or your people are very, very good at what you do. That’s all right. We’re very, very good at what we do as well.”

I said nothing, but slid my right hand over the bandage covering the inside of my left elbow, pressing down, like I could somehow will the human skin to grow back.

This woman’s organization couldn’t be as good as they thought they were, or they would have captured Jeff as well. There was a chance they had—I couldn’t exactly ask without giving away the fact that someone had managed to escape—but I didn’t think so. She was trying too hard to keep me talking, and she wasn’t threatening to hurt him if I didn’t cooperate, or telling me he was cooperating and hence I was the extraneous one. I was their only alien. They didn’t need me to work with them. They still wanted it, badly enough to put on this little routine.

“You’ll let them go,” I said flatly. “All three of them. You’ll give them their things, and provide them with their medication, and let them go.”

“Will we, now.”

“They’re citizens. You can’t disappear them the way you can disappear me.” Honestly, I doubted her ability to disappear me without consequences. I might not be a citizen in the eyes of the government, but everyone who knew me—my housemates, my friends, my family—believed I was a real person. They believed I mattered. Unless the government wanted to announce I was an extraterrestrial, they were stuck.

“There’s a word that invalidates your entire argument.”

“What’s that?”

“Terrorist.” There was no disguising the pleasure in her voice. It was enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as she continued, “People believe what they’re told loudly enough. I don’t have to say you’re an alien. All I need to do is leak the story that a domestic terrorist is being detained for questioning and I can make you disappear so completely that no one will ever figure out where you went. You don’t hold as many chips as you think you do.”

“If you want me to cooperate—”

“If I want you to cooperate, I’ll haul your little girlfriend in here and make you explain to her why you’re keeping her away from her medication. You’ll do whatever I say after that.”

It had been so long since I’d heard someone misgender Graham that for a moment, I thought she was talking about Toni. The moment passed. Rage replaced confusion. I was on my feet before I had the chance to think better of it, hands balled into fists, turning as I shouted, so that I would be facing my captor at least once.

“Listen here, you… you… you whatever the fuck you are, you may be the human here, but that doesn’t grant you a scrap of humanity,” I snarled, making no effort to pretend I was playing nice. The time for playing nice was over. “If you hurt them, I swear to you, I will make you pay for it. I will get out of here, and I will find you, and I will make you sorry that you ever touched a hair on any of our heads. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” There was a click behind me. I whirled, and watched in wide-eyed dismay as a section of the wall slid open, revealing a hallway on the other side. The woman from the plane was standing there, a smile on her face and another Taser in her hands. She was alone, and for one dizzy moment, I considered rushing her, knocking her back and making a break for it.

“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. Her smile turned predatory. “I know what you’re thinking, and I promise you, it wouldn’t work out the way you expect. You’d be captured and restrained before you found yourself anywhere near an exit—and once you had been, there’d be no more question of whether you were going to play nicely. Your friends would absolutely become extraneous to needs at that point, and your own feelings on the matter of what was or was not to be done with you would be irrelevant. Do you understand me?”

“I understand that this is bullshit,” I spat. “You’re wasting my time.”

The woman’s eyes widened marginally.

Understanding swept through me, chasing away the remains of my rage. “You’re wasting my time, ” I breathed. “You’re trying to keep me busy, to keep me too distracted to notice something. What don’t you want me to notice?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“There’s something,” I countered. “You’re here. You’re close enough for me to reach out and grab.”

The woman took a half-step backward, further from the still open door. I frowned.

“What don’t you want me to realize?”

“If you move, I will shoot you,” she said, lifting her Taser.

“Okay. You do that.” I turned and walked back to the cot, where I sat down, folded my arms, and waited.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not moving.” With the door open, the room seemed less oppressive. I could stay here for a while. I might need to stay here forever. The idea wasn’t appealing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. If I needed to get used to being a houseplant, I could do it.

At least until the invasion came. When our ships darkened this planet’s skies, then things were going to change, and quickly. There was no way to say that without making my own situation worse, and so I said nothing at all.

“You need to talk to me.”

“No, I don’t.” I looked over my shoulder at her. “You’ve threatened my friends. You’ve threatened me, through them, and with your casual little comment about your ‘scientists’ waiting for me to wake up. You haven’t introduced yourself. You haven’t even told me which agency currently has us detained. You’ve done literally nothing to make me feel like I need to talk to you, and a hell of a lot to make me think the silent treatment may actually be more than you deserve. So give me one good reason to have a conversation that consists of something more than me telling you to go fuck yourself.”

“They’re coming.”

I said nothing.

“That signal your friend—Dr. Fabris—decided to release wasn’t the first one we’d intercepted. It wasn’t even the tenth. They’ve been getting more frequent over the last few years, but we’d been able to keep them from making the news before this. It helps that people still think anything that includes ‘and it came from space’ is a lie.” The woman lowered her Taser. “We’d been hoping to keep suppressing them until we figured out how to approach your species. Unfortunately, Dr. Fabris has made that impossible.”

“So you abducted us from a plane.”

“Miss Miller, I don’t think you understand how important this is to national security.”

“I don’t think you understand how much I don’t like being abducted from a plane,” I countered. “I want to go home. I want to see my cat. Is that a thing you can help me with?”

“Miss Miller, you will be lucky if you ever see the outside of this facility again.”

My hand went to the bandage on my inner elbow. “Because of what I am.”

“Yes.” She nodded once. “Because you’re not a human being. You have no right to walk freely on the soil of this world, and we want you to cooperate. We want you to help us prepare.”

“Why me? Why not one of the others?”

“I’ll be blunt: you were a target of opportunity. The others have stayed close to home. They’ve surrounded themselves with people who would miss them. You put yourself into a position where we could take you and most of the people who might object at the same time.”

“You could have said ‘please.’”

“Could we? Could we have just strolled up to you and said ‘Hello, we’re from the government, we know you’re a representative of an alien species which may or may not intend to harm us, can we convince you to tell us all your secrets’? Because you’ll forgive me for being dubious if I say that sounds more than reasonably unlikely.”

“You could have tried,” I said stubbornly.

She sighed. “We have no way of knowing precisely when your ride will be here—but rest assured, we know it’s coming. They’re on their way.”

“You still could have tried.”

“Is there anything we could do to make you cooperate? As you say, we have you. To a certain degree, we can do as we like. But we would prefer you answer our questions willingly.”

Something about this whole situation didn’t smell right. Either I’d been taken captive by amateur hour—which didn’t match up with the way they’d been able to ground our plane before it reached Seattle—or they were trying, very hard, to pretend that I had. And whichever it was, I needed to get everyone else out of here. It wasn’t altruism; it was the mathematics of escape.

Once I was the only person here, I could focus on me. Once I knew Graham and the others were safe, I wouldn’t need to worry about getting them away, or about them being used as levers against me.

“I want my companions released,” I said flatly. “If the footage from the plane has made the news, I want some sort of public statement that they were detained in error. I want proof I’m your only ‘guest.’ Do that, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“You have no rights, no standing, and no way out,” she said. “Are you sure this is a deal you want to make?”

Again, something was off, and again, I couldn’t afford to care. “Yes,” I said firmly.

She smiled.