Page 19 of Overgrowth

Tucson, Arizona: July 27, 2031

Eleven days pre-invasion

1.

The forest unfolded in a beautiful array of impossible greens and browns, their colors familiar and yet new, like they were coming into prismatic focus. I stood. The air was cleaner than it had ever been, and the taste of it was faintly acidic, like it was eating away the skin at the back of my throat. The sensation wasn’t painful—almost the opposite, a quiet cleansing that would make everything better, if I just allowed it to happen.

“There you are.”

I whirled.

Jeff was standing on a low rise some ten feet behind me, one hand resting on the trunk of an alien tree, a weary expression on what remained of his face. The bandage was gone. So was most of the skin. In their place, he had a twisting mass of vines and roots, some thin as filaments, others thick as garter snakes. They were in constant motion, twining around each other in complicated knots that unlooped themselves as quickly as they had formed.

Breath catching in my throat, I looked down at my left arm.

The skin was gone from the elbow to the tips of my fingers, replaced by a mass of vines thicker than the ones on Jeff’s face, darker in shade and covered with thorns like a blackberry creeper. I raised my arm to the level of my eyes, drinking it in. There were small white flowers with petals like a butterfly’s wings hidden at the center, visible only in glimpses between the moving vines. The thorns smelled sharp and astringent, and I knew they were tipped in some sort of complicated poison, something that would stop hearts with a touch.

“Is this…?” I whispered, and stopped, unable to finish the question.

“Once,” said Jeff. I looked up. He was watching me with sympathy in his still-too-human eyes. “A lot of worlds ago. You and me, we’ll never have this in the real world. Only here.”

“Why?” I couldn’t keep the relief out of my voice; I didn’t even really try. After a lifetime lived in a human skin, the thought of becoming whatever Jeff was turning into—whatever I was turning into—didn’t appeal.

“We adapt. World after world, we adapt. Are you all right?” He took a step toward me, his still-human hands reaching out for mine. I took them, fingers on one side and vines like tendrils on the other. “I’ve been so worried.”

“You got away.”

“They knew there were four of us. They didn’t know there were five. Thankfully.” He cocked his head. “You weren’t sure?”

“No. I couldn’t be. They haven’t let me see anyone, and it wasn’t like I could ask ‘Hey, do you have another plant person in your holding cells?’” I had only the word of my keepers that they’d released Graham and the others. Maybe they were still captive somewhere in this sprawling compound, unwitting hostages against my good behavior. I hoped not. I didn’t trust the people holding me, but I wanted to believe they were trying to do the right thing for their own species. I was the only alien here. Let the humans go.

As if he’d read my thoughts, Jeff said, “Your boyfriend and the others are fine. They’ve been going on every conspiracy-theory podcast you can think of to talk about how the government is holding you. Listening to them try to say it without outright calling you an alien invader is sort of fun, in a weird kind of way. They don’t want to turn their audience against you.”

I blinked. “Even Toni?”

“Your weird little astronomer friend? No. She’s going on a different set of podcasts, telling anyone who’ll listen that you’re coming to devour us all and we shouldn’t let the government hide you. Funny thing is, since all those podcasts have different audiences, they’re working up a pretty good head of steam. Half the listeners want to save you and the other half want you tried for treason, but they’re paying attention.”

“Huh.” It was hard to say whether or not that was a good thing. At least they were free. “How… What took you so long to find me? Where are you?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.” Jeff’s face took on a grim cast. I realized I could understand the slow twine of his tendrils, even though they were like nothing I had ever seen before. Apparently, the part of me that remembered the stars remembered what we’d looked like among them, too. “If you knew, they could try to make you tell them. Are they torturing you?”

“Not yet.” It was coming; I knew it was coming. The shape of their false flag was becoming clearer with every test they set before me. Quiz after quiz, maze after maze, even video games and books of puzzles. They were trying to figure out how smart I was, to find the places where my intelligence deviated from their ideas of the human norm. They knew if they dug deeply enough, they’d find something that could be used to distinguish the way I thought from the way the humans around me thought. After all, if I had one compulsion that betrayed my nature, why wouldn’t I have more?

So far, none of their tests had found anything more than an increasingly annoyed subject—me. Which would have been fine, if they hadn’t been murmuring in the corners of the room when they thought I was busy focusing on my math worksheets or word problems. This wasn’t working. They weren’t getting the results they wanted. They were going to move on to something more invasive than workbooks and the occasional blood test, and they were going to do it soon.

“Good.” Jeff shook his head. “I’m trying to figure out how to get you out of there. Officially, you’re not being held. Officially—”

“Did you know we’re not citizens?”

For the first time, he looked surprised. “What?”

“Our seeds may have sprouted here, but a bear’s not a citizen, and that means we’re not either. Citizenship is for humans.” I smiled bitterly. “If we want to insist we’re not members of their species, they’re going to stop treating us like we are.”

“That makes… sense, I suppose,” said Jeff. He frowned. “But they’re not torturing you.”

“No.” Now it was my turn to frown. “Why are you focusing so much on torture? What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’m fifteen miles away. I’m not going to tell you which direction. This is the first time I’ve been able to find you in the forest.”

“So?”

“So I’ve been here for three days.” This time, his expression was pure anguish. “ I couldn’t get into the forest until I moved out more than ten miles. It’s taken boosting the signal to—”

“You’re not alone.” I stared at him. “You found more of us.”

“Yes.”

It was a small admission. It changed everything. Suddenly, my boring days and lack of torture seemed less amateur hour, and more like a way to lower my defenses. “Are any of them scientists?”

“A few,” he admitted. “One is—”

“ Don’t tell me,” I snapped. He fell silent, a surprised expression on his half-vegetable face. I shook my head. “Ask them whether there’s any way someone who isn’t one of us could know about the forest. Ask if we give out a… a signal, or something people could track.”

Jeff’s surprise faded into wariness. “Why?”

“Because I think they’ve figured out a way to block that connection, at least over short distances,” I said. “I haven’t been able to reach the forest, and you haven’t been able to reach me. That’s not normal. When I’m upset, when I’m alone, I come to the forest.” Until I had recovered my connection, I hadn’t even realized it was lost. There was something chilling about that. We were so close to human, thanks to upbringing and outward appearance. It would have been so easy to let go of the things that distinguished us and melt into the quiet comfort of belonging to this world, of fitting in.

It would have been easy, that was, before Toni had decided to boost our fleet’s signal around the globe. I untwined the vines of my transformed hand from Jeff’s fingers, trying not to see the sorrow that bloomed in his eyes in response to my withdrawal, and held it up for him to see.

“The green hasn’t spread outside of here,” I said. “It’s still just a patch on the inside of my elbow.”

“Maybe it’s beneath the surface.”

“They’re taking blood samples and X-rays daily. I should probably be worried about the radiation. But it hasn’t spread. They find meat, meat, meat, and suddenly, this little patch of vegetable.” They had taken scrapings and biopsies and samples, enough so that the bend of my elbow looked like a warzone and ached every time I bent my arm. If my vegetable skin scarred like my meat skin, it was never going to be the same.

I sort of hoped it would. I wanted to remember this forever. I wanted to know why I could no longer trust the bulk of humanity. I wasn’t theirs and they weren’t mine. Maybe we never really had been.

“So what do you think that means?”

“I think… the signal primed us to start changing, and the forest spreads and speeds the change.” I put my pseudo-human hand over the base of the vines, feeling them twist and twine beneath my fingers. There was strength in those creepers. The kind of strength that could put a plant on a level with the animals around it. The kind of strength that could, if properly marshalled, conquer a world.

Jeff nodded. It was getting easier and easier to read the expression in his vegetative face. “That matches up with what the rest of us have been experiencing. I’m glad you’re all right. I’ll check on you as much as I can. We’re trying to find a way to get you out of this.”

“Good,” I said. “Please keep an eye on my people. Don’t let them get hurt.”

Jeff’s smile was quick and wry. “This is a war, Stasia,” he said. “Everyone’s going to get hurt.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, letting my chin dip toward my chest. When I opened them again, I was looking at the ceiling of my room. The lights were set at a constant dim almost-twilight, making it easy for me to see what I was doing as I sat up and rolled back my sleeve, rotating my arm. I wasn’t worried about the hidden cameras around me picking up the motion. There were no secrets here. Better for me to know as soon as possible.

The skin around the edges of the green patch on my arm was peeling and thin, like the papery coating on an onion. I plucked gingerly at one of the edges, tugging until it came loose and tore away in a long, lifeless strip.

The flesh beneath was dark green and healthy, smelling of sap and loam, like the forest had somehow followed me back to my cell. I lowered my nose and breathed in deep, taking every particle of that perfect, utterly alien smell into my lungs. I almost thought I could feel this new air moving through me, making little changes as it went, getting me ready, getting things prepared.

Everything was changing now. It was too late to turn back. Maybe it always had been.

Propping my shoulders against the cell wall, I closed my eyes and waited for the morning.

2.

As expected, the scientists were in a tizzy over the sudden expansion of the green patch on my arm. They made me peel away sev eral more strips of papery skin, making me wish I’d spent more time picking at myself in the middle of the night. At least then I could have breathed in the scent of my own body in peace, instead of watching every scrap I removed whisked away for further analysis while people in white coats pressed in to study and record every little thing they could.

When the last of the skin was peeled away, the patch had grown from the size of a quarter to a long streak extending all the way down my forearm, stretching almost to the base of my wrist. A strip of raw, red flesh off to the left clearly demonstrated the demarcation. That wasn’t my fault: one of the scientists had insisted more skin could be removed, and had sliced away a piece that was still pretending to be human.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d just been sorry about it. Instead, she had said something delighted about having a sample of the transitional zone, tucked the bleeding piece of me into a petri dish, and run off, presumably to pick it apart at her leisure. Everything about me was something to put under a microscope.

With a click-clacking of heels against the industrial linoleum floor, my original captor, the still-nameless agent of whatever alphabet agency I currently belonged to, made her return. I raised my head and watched her approach, my eyes narrowed in consideration. This place was too sterile, too featureless and simple, to have been built by accident: real government agencies don’t look like they’re part of Barbie’s Dream Interrogation Complex. This place had been designed. Designed for me, or for whichever lucky member of my species had happened to become vulnerable first.

I had been here for days without being able to access the forest or communicate with my own kind. The forest had to be more than a network for those of here on Earth. I hadn’t even known that it could be used as a network until I’d stumbled over Jeff. So who benefited from my being able to go there? Who, if not the fleet, slowly approaching, needing to know things about the world it was about to take? Cultural literacy. Those were the words that kept haunting me. Something about them held the answer, and as soon as I knew exactly what it was…

I would still be locked in a featureless room, watching people who refused to give me their names as they came and went around me. No weapons, no way of initiating communication with the outside world, no way out.

“Sleep well, Miss Miller?” purred the nameless agent. There was a bright, smug note in her tone, like she already knew what my answer would be.

Then again, maybe she did. The green patch on my arm was an announcement of its own kind. I tried to pull my arm against my body, instinctively shielding it from her, and stopped as the scientist who had been trying to take my blood pressure jerked my elbow back into position. It hurt. I bit the inside of my cheek, and did my best not to let it show.

“There was a glitch in the wireless field surrounding the complex last night,” said the agent. “It was nothing serious—we were never concerned about losing physical containment—but for a short period, we were unable to maintain a closed circuit.”

“I don’t understand what you think this has to do with me,” I said. “I was asleep. It’s not like there’s anything else for me to do in here.”

“Of course.” She gave the green patch on my arm another meaningful look. “Did you have pleasant dreams?”

“Oh, sure. I dreamt you’d known about us for long enough to build an entire facility just to keep us in, one where we couldn’t possibly learn anything we’d be able to use against you—not that we’d be looking, since I’m pretty sure few, if any, of us are trained spies—but you could learn about us at your leisure. I dreamt you know how to keep us from communicating with one another.” I looked at her levelly, fighting the urge to yank my arm away again. “This needs to end.”

“If you wanted this to end, you shouldn’t have invaded our planet.” The levity drained from her face. “Thus far, we’ve been more than pleasant to you. We’ve practically turned your incarceration into a vacation getaway.”

“Most vacations don’t require me to give this much blood,” I snapped.

“They might, if they knew what you were.” She took another step forward, looking around at my swarm of scientists. “Give us the room.”

They stopped, some looking shocked, while others simply looked resigned. None of them argued with her. They just gathered their equipment and left the room, pouring out around us, until it was only the two of us left, me and the agent without a name. She folded her hands behind her back, looking down her nose at me. I crossed my arms, hiding the green patch from her view. I felt better knowing that she couldn’t see it. Even if nothing could make her forget that it was there, she couldn’t see it.

Jeff didn’t have that option. I felt a pang of relief that my skin had started ripping in a place I could cover so easily, and smothered that feeling quickly in a veil of guilt. Jeff hadn’t chosen to have his face start melting into green. Neither of us had ever had a choice, in any of this.

“You went somewhere last night,” said the agent, once the last of the scientists was gone. “Where?”

“I didn’t go anywhere. I was right here all night. I’m a plant invader, not a ghost.”

“Your arm tells me otherwise.”

“What’s your name?”

“That information is classified.”

“Well, so is any information relating to where I may or may not have gone last night.” I leaned back, looking at her coolly. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Do you honestly think we can’t make you tell us anything we want to know? We had a deal. We let your friends go, and in exchange, you answer our questions. Do you want to face the consequences of going back on your word?” The corner of her mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile. “I promise you, you’re not the only one who would regret that.”

“I’ve answered all your questions up until this moment. You haven’t answered a single one of mine.”

“That wasn’t our agreement.”

“Maybe not, but how am I supposed to know what you need to know if I don’t have any information?” I glared at her. “I didn’t know there was a wireless field around this place. Why the hell is there a wireless field?”

“Because you invaders seem to know what’s coming before it gets there,” she said calmly. “We don’t know how you’re sharing information. We would very much like to know. You’re going to help with that.”

“No, I’m really not.”

“Again, you promised—”

“I’m not, because I don’t know anything.” I allowed myself to smirk. Trying to school my emotions was just going to make me look like I was hiding something. And I was hiding something: I was hiding the fact that Jeff was nearby and gathering an army to recover me. As long as she didn’t catch on to that, I was in good shape. “Until you told me, I had no idea a wireless field could interfere with anything. I sleep, I dream, sometimes I wake up knowing stuff I didn’t know when I went to bed the night before. I thought it worked that way for everybody. Aren’t dreams supposed to organize things you learned the day before?”

“It doesn’t work that way for humans,” she said, through gritted teeth. “What else have you been hiding?”

I sighed, frustrated. “I’m not hiding anything. I wasn’t hiding that. I didn’t know; that’s not the same as hiding something. Unless you have a complete, totally accurate map to the way humans are supposed to work, I can’t tell you where I deviate from it, because I don’t know. I’ve been what I am for my entire life.”

“That’s not true.” Her face lit up, and for a moment, she looked like nothing more than some grand predator preparing to pounce. “Anastasia Miller, age three. Human. Disappeared in the woods behind her grandparents’ residence for several hours. Returned claiming to be from another planet. You killed that little girl. You stole her life. You took her place. You know you’re not human.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’ve always known I wasn’t human. I told everyone who would listen. I told people I knew would want to hurt me for being a weirdo. I never lied. I never concealed anything. And look where it got me. You still won’t admit this place is a… a Habitrail for aliens. All I’m missing is an exercise wheel.”

If the agent was disappointed that I wasn’t more upset, she didn’t show it. Instead, she shook her head, and said, “You don’t understand how good you have things right now. You don’t see how lucky you are. We’d be within our rights to take you apart.”

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, you’re mostly going to find human bits, at least if what your scientists say is anything to go by—they sort of assume that since I’m not one of them, I’m stupid, and they let a lot slip. Nothing useful unless I want to fully understand my own currently hybrid biology, but hey. Everything’s got to go somewhere.”

“You need to cooperate.”

“I am cooperating. You need to tell me what you think I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not. I can’t be a good little test subject with no information.”

“All you’re supposed to do is answer our questions and tell us what we want to know.”

“I can’t do that if I don’t know what you want to know.” I couldn’t miss the fact that she’d made those things different clauses. She wanted me to answer the questions I was asked, and volunteer the information I wasn’t asked for. There was one big problem with that: I was telling the truth when I said that I didn’t know what was remarkable. I was concealing the existence of the forest, yes, but until she’d interfered with my connection to it, I hadn’t realized it was something that could be blocked off.

They knew more about me than I did. That was chilling. Even more chilling was the fact that I still didn’t know who they were. I could talk back and roll my eyes all I wanted, acting like a bratty teen who didn’t want to clean her room, but that wouldn’t answer my questions, and it wouldn’t really slow them down. It was a nothing more than a show of powerless defiance. On some level, I wished I could quit it, go along with their requests and be a model prisoner… but that, too, wouldn’t change anything. All it would do was undermine the last coping mechanism I had.

I wasn’t that ready to give up.

“You need to get better at predicting what we need.”

“You need to tell me who you are. ”

To my surprise, she smiled. “You really aren’t prepared for what you came here to do, are you?” she asked. “You should have figured it out by now.”

“Since the Men in Black aren’t real, I think I’m doing okay.”

“You’re not. Sadly, you’re not going to have a chance to recover from your own errors.” Her smile thinned, tightened, became the triumphant snarl of a predator. “Now that we know how to accelerate the changes, we may be leaving the field down a bit more frequently. We need something to show our superiors, if we’re going to get permission to move on to the next stage. You should be getting down on your knees and thanking me for letting your little ‘boyfriend’ leave. Do you really think he’ll want to touch you after the last of your skin peels away, and he can see you for want you actually are?”

I spat at her. It was a foolish, childish thing to do. It was the only thing I could think of.

She was still laughing as she walked out of the room. The door shut behind her, and I was alone. Sort of.

The problem with solitude in a place like this was that it wasn’t real. It was an illusion, designed to make me feel like I had privacy. I didn’t. I couldn’t. They were monitoring everything about me, from the amount I ate to the number of times I asked to be taken to the bathroom.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back in my seat and waited for the scientists to return. They had more tests to run—they always had more tests to run—and if my nameless captor was planning to leave the wireless field down again tonight, if she wanted to see the evidence of my nature continue to spread, they were going to want a complete picture of what I looked like right now. I was less human than I had been the day before, and I was more human than I was ever going to be again.

The thought should have distressed me. At the very least, it should have had me worried about the way the people I cared about were going to respond the next time they saw me. Would Lucas still be happy to rent me a room when he could no longer pretend that I was an ordinary woman with a weird fondness for claiming to be an alien? Would Mandy still want to be my friend?

Would Graham still love me?

Those were big questions. Important questions. Not as important as the question of who was actually holding me here. Of the alphabet agencies, the TSA and CDC seemed to be the least likely—the one because I would never have made it onto the plane in the first place, and the other because I wasn’t an infection. I wasn’t contagious. I was just from someplace else.

The FBI and CIA seemed similarly unlikely, if only because this was all too byzantine. I was looking for an organization with a lot of time on its hands, one that could have spent decades monitoring alien activity on Earth without stepping in. The CIA would have rounded us all up years ago if they had actually believed we were what we claimed to be. The FBI might not have arrested us, but they would have made their presence known. I would have seen them long since, if only from a distance.

That left two big candidates, one likely, one a little more out there. If this was the NSA, a lot of the coy, surreal, cat-with-mouse behavior would make a lot more sense. The NSA had plenty to keep themselves busy, but they had always struck me as the alphabet agency with more of a desire to grow up and become an evil empire. Setting James Bond–esque alien traps would only appeal to them.

If it was NASA, I was in trouble.

NASA had a genuine interest in space, and in the things that came from space, whether friendly or not. NASA had the telescopes and the probes and the monitoring equipment. Most of all, NASA had the constantly dropping budget, the picture of an agency in unwilling freefall, and they needed a win. Strange as the facility was, I could easily tilt my head and see its oddities as cost-cutting measures. Buy your plans from the lowest bidder and hey! No windows. Poor ventilation. Rooms in the middle of nowhere, with no logical air flow.

It made sense, and I didn’t want it to, because if this was NASA, I was more than just screwed: I was well and truly fucked.

The door opened. I opened my eyes, trying to look impassive as the scientists poured back in with their scalpels and sample kits and endless, insensible questions. Half of them weren’t for me, even though I was the one they asked: they were for the biosphere that formed me, the atmosphere that was supposed to fill my lungs. They were for the roots I left behind when I pulled myself from the vine, and since I was the only one available to ask, they were asked of me, one after the other, as if repetition might somehow unlock the truth.

Two familiar faces passed me, as nameless as the agent who controlled my fate. Behind them, wrapped in a tight white coat, her hair pulled into a messy bun, was someone whose familiarity was less of a trial and more of a slap across the face. I sat up straighter, fighting to school my expression of surprise and dismay into resignation.

Mandy met my eyes for a moment, then looked away. She didn’t nod. She didn’t do anything to betray the fact that she knew me. She simply followed the others to the table, where they began setting up their equipment, talking loudly about how inconvenient these interruptions were. One of them suggested I be sedated when not actively taking tests, since it wasn’t like I was telling them anything useful. Another said they couldn’t wait until my bone marrow began to mutate, since then they’d be able to really understand the interaction between the mammalian and vegetable cells in my body.

Through it all, Mandy moved, carrying things for other people, making adjustments when called upon to do so. She never said a word, and apart from that first glance, she didn’t look at me.

One of the other scientists—a tall, gray-haired man who seemed to take my lack of communication as a personal affront, as if I were targeting him specifically, and not being balky with everyone—approached me, a phlebotomy kit in his hand. “Arm,” he said, not bothering with anything as trivial as a greeting. “I need blood from the margin of your mutating cells.”

“Does it really count as mutation when it’s a natural transition?” asked another scientist. “I really think we should be referring to this process as ‘metamorphosis.’”

The scientist who wanted my blood snorted in disdain, while several others started arguing over which term was more appropriate. I wasn’t the only one going stir-crazy in here. Only Mandy hung back from the discussion-slash-argument, looking like she had no idea what she was supposed to do with her hands now that the equipment was all lain out. She was a cosplayer and this was a role, but all the fake scientists she’d played over the years weren’t going to be enough to give her actual training.

I stuck out my arm, willing Mandy to find something else to do, willing her to keep refusing to look at me. If she just didn’t look at me…

She looked at me.

The scientist was tying a plastic loop around my arm, just above the elbow, to make my veins easier to find. The dark green patch of skin was impossible to miss, and only grew more visible as it suffused with blood. It began to brighten, going from pine to emerald green, and I fought the urge to close my eyes. The scientists might notice if I did that. I usually watched when they took my blood, refusing to give them the satisfaction of making me look away. I had so little control left over what happened to me. There was no way I was ceding what remained.

In that moment, I would have given up all the control I had and then some, if it meant Mandy wasn’t looking at the green patch on my arm. Then the needle slid into my flesh, the vial beginning to fill, and I had something new to distract me.

The blood was red, mammalian and bright… at least at first. After the vial had filled roughly a quarter of the way, the red began showing streaks of brackish gray-green. The scientist made a wordless sound of amazement, and his peers flocked to watch as I continued bleeding. First the red gave way completely, and then vivid green overwhelmed the gray. Finally, just as the vial reached capacity, the green faded as well, replaced by clear amber, like pine sap.

Sap. I was bleeding sap.

“Don’t just stand there, you stupid thing, give me another vial!” snapped the scientist, holding his hand out to Mandy. She broke out of her frozen shock with a gulping noise, fumbling to grab what he was asking for.

Luckily for her—maybe luckily for both of us—the scientists pressing in around me were too distracted by the scientific miracle of the year to notice that their new assistant was incompetent. Several set up cries for blood samples of their own, and one began demanding a bone marrow sample with such vehemence that I was briefly afraid she might grab a scalpel and try to take it for herself.

Mandy handed over the replacement vials and stepped back, out of the fray, finally allowing our eyes to meet. I blinked slowly, but didn’t look away. I’d been locking eyes with the scientists since I got here, daring them to see me as a human being. Mandy was no different. If I wanted her to go unnoticed, Mandy had to be no different.

Run, I thought fiercely. Get out of here and never look back. The others were gone, hopefully safe somewhere the people running this facility would never touch them again—not without causing a public-relations disaster that the world, leery of invasion and unwilling to admit to the existence of aliens, wasn’t ready to face. They could stay free, if they were careful.

But Mandy, for whatever reason, was here. She had walked right into the jaws of the enemy, and if someone figured out who she was, she wasn’t going to be walking out. All issues of national security and classified facilities aside, she was something they hadn’t had since they’d released Graham and the others: she was leverage on two legs. They could make me agree to anything, make me tell them anything, if they threatened her.

Would they hurt her? Honestly, I didn’t know. They’d been working hard since the day they’d taken me to make sure they didn’t—and wouldn’t—think of me as human. I was a person, sure. I could answer questions and solve logic problems and be a pain in their collective asses. But I wasn’t human, and that meant hurting me wasn’t wrong. Hurting me was protecting humanity. Of such loopholes are a horrifying number of atrocities born.

Mandy though, Mandy was human, and while the people now doing their best to exsanguinate me might be willing to torture an alien invader, they’d done nothing to indicate they’d do the same to their own kind. They’d threatened, sure, but I wasn’t sure I could—or should—believe them. They were trying to save the world by taking me apart. They probably thought of themselves as noble, heroes of the coming triumph of mankind over the vegetables from space.

Go, I thought.

Mandy didn’t go. Mandy wasn’t one of us, wasn’t connected to the forest where we could share information without speaking—and the forest wasn’t true telepathy anyway. Jeff and I hadn’t shown any signs of reading one another’s minds when we were together. Whatever connected us, it wasn’t nearly that useful.

Instead, Mandy took a tray laden with vials of my blood—because what else was I going to call it—and asked, in her clear, careful “I am performing here” voice, “Where should I put this?”

“I’ll go with you,” said the first scientist, a greedy, proprietary note in his voice. He’d been the one to draw the first sample; he was the one who got the vial where my blood transitioned from human normal into something that should never have come out of a body that looked like mine.

“How much blood have we taken today?” asked one of the others, reaching for her notes.

“Too much.” The voice belonged to the nameless agent. Everyone in the room turned toward the door, even Mandy, who was picking up her cues from the crowd.

Please be careful, I thought. I’m not worth this.

It was almost funny. I was anticipating the moment when the skies would go black with ships, a whole alien armada swooping in from the depths of space to do… what, I still wasn’t entirely sure. Whoever had dropped me here hadn’t seen fit to give me a lot of details about the invasion, or maybe I’d been on this planet long enough to forget them the way I’d forgotten so much about my childhood as Anastasia Miller. I knew the invasion was real. I knew whatever my people intended for this planet wasn’t going to be much fun for the locals. People—human people, people like Mandy—were going to die. But I could still worry about the humans who were my friends. I could still want to know that they would be protected from their own kind, if not from mine.

Hypocrisy isn’t a purely human trait. I think it comes from the natural contradictions inherent in being a sapient creature in a world where it’s impossible to survive without causing harm to something. Herbivores eat plants. On a world like Earth, where the plants don’t talk or have opinions, that may seem like the least harm possible, but on a world like the one where my people evolved? A world I’ve never seen and never will, where I would have looked like the thing I was becoming in the forest? The plants there would have had a few opinions on the ethics of veganism.

Mandy was human, no question. Mandy was meat, hot flesh and red blood and everything else that came with humanity. But she was also mine, and things that belonged to me deserved to be protected.

The agent stepped into the room. There was something almost dainty in the way she walked, like she was crossing some invisible line between the past and the future. Her eyes were on the tray of my blood, partitioned into individual vials for easier examination. By the last few, there were no traces of red or green remaining. It glimmered golden and clear, like maple syrup, like the honey at the heart of the world.

“Well,” she said. “This is a new development, isn’t it, Miss Miller? It seems your camouflage may be beginning to fail you.”

“It’s not camouflage if it’s not intentional,” said one of the scientists. The agent turned a mild gaze on her. She reddened but continued, “It’s mimicry. Camouflage involves an intentional act of blending into one’s environment.”

“Fascinating,” said the agent. She turned to the scientist who initiated the blood draw. “I’ll want copies of all your reports. We need to understand the biological makeup of these things if we’re going to develop a proper weed killer before they get here.”

“We could be coming in peace,” I snapped, unable to stop myself from stealing a glance at Mandy. She was watching the agent, apparently no longer aware of my presence.

We weren’t coming in peace. I knew that down to my bones, or to whatever might be replacing them one sliver at a time as my vegetable heart began to bloom. But she didn’t know that. No one born to this planet knew that for sure, and if there was one thing I truly believed to be an inborn trait of the human race, it was their willingness to hope for the best.

Sadly for me, that particular trait was frequently wedded with a desire to plan for the worst. “Are you?” asked the agent. “I wasn’t aware friendly visits often began with murdering and replacing the children of one’s neighbors. Suddenly the history of this planet starts to make a great deal more sense. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, Miss Miller. You’re here. People are going to find out you’re here—the ones who don’t know already—and when they do, we’re going to have a weapon in hand that can be used to keep you from destroying us. If you come in peace, those weapons will never need to be used. If you don’t, we’ll be ready.”

“And when I tell them?” I snapped. “When my people get here and I go, ‘Oh, hey, the monkeys have something that can kill you all, maybe we need to change our minds about peace and jump straight to outright war’? What’s going to happen then?”

“My mother was a gardener,” said the agent.

I blinked. Personal information normally flowed from me to her, not the other way around. “Okay,” I said.

“Every year, she’d plant a few hundred seeds, and every year, half of them would fail to sprout. It was like something in the soil didn’t get along with them. That, or nature understood that not every seed was a good one, and wouldn’t let the bad ones grow.” Her smile was quick and feral. “Do you think your people will notice a few missing spies? Or will they just write you off as seeds that didn’t sprout, and go about their business? If they come in peace, well. Every one of you represents a dead one of us. They’ll probably look the other way out of pure politeness.”

“And if they don’t?”

“If they don’t, they didn’t come in peace to begin with, and if they didn’t come in peace, all we’d do by taking you apart before they get here is get a jump start on the enemy.” She looked around at the scientists. “You’ve got your blood. Go run your tests. I’ll tell you when she’s available again.”

They surged toward the door, taking Mandy with them. I was starting to feel shaky from blood loss; the room was swimming in and out of focus, like a camera with a bad lens.

“Can I have some juice or something?” I asked.

The agent smiled again. There was no kindness there.

“Juice is for the dominant species,” she said, and closed the door, leaving me alone.