Page 20 of Overgrowth

3.

Blood loss is a tricky thing. It sneaks up on you, especially when it’s managed with tubes and needles and civilized trappings, rather than with stab wounds or lacerations. I tried to stand. The room spun around me. I sat back down and considered my options.

The bed was inviting all out of proportion to its thin mattress and scratchy blanket. I’d never bothered making it, taking the occasional comments from the scientists or my hosts as an opportunity to point out that they were the ones insisting on coming into my “bedroom” to jab me with needles and make me take invasive personality tests. If they didn’t like to be reminded that I lived here—against my will—they could find another lab rat.

Of course, the bed was also almost six feet away, and even if I managed to stand, I wasn’t sure I could walk. Normally, that kind of blood donation would have been followed with cookies and orange juice, healing sugar sharp on the tongue like forgiveness, like restoration.

There wasn’t going to be any of that here. Only a silent room, and the sound of my heart beating sluggish and unsteady in my ears. There was a squishiness under the familiar beat, like even it wasn’t sure what to do with the current situation.

I closed my eyes. I only meant to blink, but as the darkness deepened and the unsteady thudding of my heart grew louder, I realized I was on the verge of losing consciousness.

Fine. Maybe sleep would make the healing process seem faster, or at least less disorienting. I stopped clinging to consciousness, letting myself tumble down the rabbit hole that was opening inside my skull. If I fell out of the chair from dizziness, at least I wouldn’t be likely to feel it.

Down, down, down I tumbled, until the dizzying sensation of the world spinning around me faded, replaced by the nothingness of slumber. It seemed silly to keep my eyes closed when I was asleep, and so I opened them, relaxing at the familiar, reassuring sight of the forest around me.

“Stasia?” The voice was female, and unfamiliar, with the sweet hint of a Newfoundland accent making my name into something altogether new. I turned. She stood in the shade of the alien trees, far enough back that it was difficult to tell where she stopped and the foliage around her began. Her hair—a writhing mass of vines thinner and finer than the ones comprising my hand—helped with that impression. I couldn’t tell whether she was green or not. The hair made it a moot question. She was ours.

“Hi,’” I said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“I’m Tahlia. Jeff has us sleeping in shifts, in case you come back.” Her accent made her amusement a broad, unmistakable thing. “He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll stay.”

“They’ve taken down the field that was keeping us out. Unless they slap it back up again, I’d wager you can stay as long as you like.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m not asleep, I’m unconscious.”

She stepped forward, and I saw that her hair sprouted not only from her scalp, but the sides of her neck and the slopes of her shoulders. She was a tree walking, in the process of coming into bloom, and the scowl on her pale green face was a terrible thing to behold.

“Unconscious?” she repeated, amusement giving way to anger. “What have they done to you?”

“Took too much blood, too fast,” I said. “I’m not bleeding red anymore, by the way.”

“What color?”

“Gold.”

“Sap, then.” She smiled, expression doing nothing to chase the anger from her eyes. “Congratulations.”

“Do you know…” I hesitated, fumbling over the words, which felt heavy and almost foreign on my tongue. Finally, I continued, “Do you know what that means? To stop bleeding?”

“It means you’re closer to flowering.” She took another step forward, coming out of the shadows.

The vines of her hair were fruiting, clusters of purple berries with an iridescent sheen, like a beetle’s back, clinging to their length in groups of three and four. There were flowers there as well, tiny things with ladybug wings that shivered in the air. She was the daughter of a people who had evolved very far away from the world where I’d been raised, and she was beautiful, and she scared me all the way to the soles of my feet.

She still had two hands, with ten fingers and smooth palms, but her feet were gone, replaced by slithering root balls that seemed to anchor her with every step she took. Those roots retracted just as fast; there was no stutter in her step.

Tahlia saw me staring and smiled again, wryly this time. “It’s a hard transition, no?” She nodded toward the vines of my left arm. “I bet that wasn’t the easiest thing to wake up and see.”

“Is it really waking up when we have to go to sleep to get there?”

Tahlia shrugged. “You tell me.”

“It’s not what I expected. Jeff tells me we won’t ever look like this when we’re awake.”

“No. We’re like watermelons grown in square molds. What’s inside looks like any other of their species, but the rind isn’t going to reshape itself just because the mold is taken away. We’ll always seem like miscolored humans to the people of this planet, and to each other. Maybe that’s a good thing.” She shrugged again, setting the vines of her hair rippling. “This isn’t our first house call. We’ve had a lot of forms, and we’ve kept them all, because we owe that much to the fields that feed us.”

“How do you know that?” I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice. “I don’t know what’s going on half the time, I don’t even know which alphabet organization is holding me captive, and you—”

“It’s NASA.”

I stopped.

“They don’t have any real terrestrial authority, but we’ve sort of muddied the waters, what with being a threat from another planet.” She ran her fingers idly through her hair, which twined and tangled around them, pulling them deeper into its mass. The petals chimed. It was a surprisingly pleasant sound. “I think they pulled it off by claiming this was probably a hoax, but since they have yet to discover life on Mars or anything like that, they had the time to kill. Now it’s not a hoax anymore, and they still have ownership.”

“We have to get me out of here. NASA doesn’t have anything left to lose, and now that I’m getting obviously alien, I’m going to become the goose that lays the golden eggs. I can be their funding for a decade.”

“Or until the armada gets here, but yes,” Tahlia agreed. “As to how I know this, we have a senator.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“The honorable Senator Franklin Davis of Denver, Colorado, had an encounter with an interesting flower in the woods when he was five years old. He’s got one of the best special-effects makeup artists in the world—also one of ours—working around the clock to keep him appearing human on camera for as long as possible. He’s been feeding information to his copse, and they’ve been feeding it out to the rest of us. Our broadcast range isn’t what it could be—yet. Once the ships get here, we won’t need to play relay anymore.”

“The forest gets… stronger?”

“The more of us there are, the better we’ll be.” She pulled her hand out of her hair, holding a few dozen of those glistening berries. She held them out to me. “Your friend. Did she make it in?”

“You mean Mandy? You know about her?” I fought the urge to slap her berry-filled hand away. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, sending her in there?”

“Getting you out,” she replied calmly. “We couldn’t send one of us. Since taking you, they’ve been able to figure out how to spot us. It’s all about the level of oxygen we emit through our skins. Set up the right kind of scanners and we’ll set off alarms just by walking past them. The airports all have those now, by the way, and the train stations will be next. They’re going to narrow our options one avenue of transit at a time, until they have us pinned down, and then they’re going to collect us.”

“They’d have to know where to find us.”

“And that’s why we sent your friend.” Her eyes—which were entirely green, I realized, just different shades, from a green so pale it was almost white to a green so dark it could have passed for black—narrowed slightly. “They’ve found the range of electromagnetic signals we use to generate this forest. It’s a talent we developed on our homeworld, before we knew how to uproot ourselves. Right now, they can block it by blocking a vast swath of frequencies. The longer they have you, the more closely they’ll be able to narrow in on where we are.”

“Until eventually, they know exactly what frequency we’re on,” I said, with slow horror. “Will they… Do you think they’ll be able to listen in?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “We have a French physicist who thinks it’s possible. They’ve learned to do so many clever things, these meatlings, and there’s no way of saying they can’t figure out how to access the forest. If they make this space unsafe, we won’t be able to communicate with the armada. Our usefulness will be at an end.”

“What is our usefulness?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I… Sometimes I think I do, and then it slips away, like it isn’t anything.” I shook my head. “It’s something to do with cultural literacy.”

Tahlia shook her head. “That’s as far as most of us have gotten. I don’t know why knowing the release order of the original Star Wars films, or being able to sing all the lyrics to Mary Poppins in Hebrew, would help with an alien invasion, but the concept of cultural literacy keeps coming up. It matters somehow. I just wish we knew why.”

“We’re getting off the subject, and I don’t know how long I can stay here.” I’d never passed out from blood loss before. I might wake up at any moment, disoriented and alone. “Why did you send Mandy in? How did you even know about her?”

“Your boyfriend located Jeff after he returned home. He’s a clever one, for a human. Good at communicating without being caught. Keep him as long as you can; you’ll miss him when he’s gone.” She didn’t sound like she believed that. If anything, she sounded like his presence was a necessary evil, a way of consorting cleanly with the planet’s dominant species. “They found out where you were being held, and, when they learned—through us—of the air samplers, decided it was time to free you. Mandy is human. She triggers none of the human failsafes. I don’t think they’ve considered that we might have human allies who will continue helping with our goals as our own humanity drops away.”

The pit of my stomach twisted painfully, like everything I’d eaten in the last year was going to make an unplanned reappearance. “We don’t know that she will.”

“Who, your Mandy?” Tahlia waved a hand dismissively. “She’s already seen me, and my own blooming is quite pronounced.”

“You’re not her roommate.” She had never stolen Tahlia’s towels or asked if she had a spare tampon. She had never slept in a house where Tahlia waited, blooming in progress, alien and strange. All those experiences were reserved for me, the girl who had never claimed to be human, and who was now, at last, being proven not to be a liar.

“She says she understands the risk, and that it’s worth it. Human or no, you remain her friend. I suggest you treasure that. Friendship is about to become a much-rarer commodity.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by that. Did plant people not believe in making friends? Why would we have a great communal non-space where we could gather if we didn’t crave each other’s company? Jeff certainly hadn’t reacted like he didn’t want to have friends—but Jeff, like the rest of us, had been raised human, and there were certain things humanity, however borrowed, made inescapable.

There wasn’t time. “What’s Mandy going to do?”

“She’s going to get you out of there. When the time comes, be prepared to run.” Tahlia smiled, wryly. “If you can. I think you’re going to wake up about now.”

“What do you—”

The forest lurched like it had been grabbed by some vast, unseen hand and shaken briskly. I yelped as I stepped backward, trying to maintain my footing. It was no use. I fell, tumbling downward until my cheek slammed into something that felt more like linoleum than loam, and I opened eyes that every fiber in my being screamed were already wide open.

I was back in my cell, which had somehow rolled onto its side, making everything distorted and strange. I blinked slowly, trying to still the pounding in my head, and realized the room hadn’t changed: I, however, had fallen out of my chair. That was just great. A solid knock against the floor was exactly what I needed to make me feel better.

Oh, wait, no. That wasn’t true at all. I tried to sit up, and groaned as my head began throbbing so hard my eyes refused to focus. Slumping back to the floor, I considered my admittedly limited options.

I could stay where I was. That was the easiest, safest short-term option. Sure, I was missing a daunting amount of blood, and with my luck I had probably given myself a concussion, but at least I couldn’t fall down again. My current exsanguinated state probably wasn’t going to get any better. I was the only alien these people had. How were they going to give me a transfusion?

I could crawl to the bed. That was tempting, but fraught. The room had never seemed so large, and the pounding in my head was severe enough that I wasn’t sure I could move without vomiting. Then I’d be crawling through a puddle of my own sick—although throwing up might summon the scientists, who would doubtless love such a valuable biological sample. If only I had faith that they’d help me to the bed. Which they wouldn’t. They’d stand around making notes on my progress until they decided it was time to draw more blood, and I’d have no way to stop them.

Passing out again wasn’t so much tempting as it was inevitable: I was on the floor, I was dizzy and in pain, and the forest waited on the other side of unconsciousness. I wasn’t sure yet what I thought of Tahlia, but she was only the second of my own kind that I’d ever met, and talking to her seemed like a good use of time that I couldn’t use any other way. I needed to start making new friends if I was about to start losing old ones.

Friends like Mandy.

Mandy was here, and Mandy was defenseless, and yeah, she was smart and quick on her feet and she looked the part, but she didn’t have any training, and whatever ID she was using to infiltrate the facility couldn’t possibly stand up to serious scrutiny. If one of the scientists ran her credentials for some reason, they’d catch on to her deception. They’d catch her, and then NASA would have a hostage against my good behavior.

Would I let them take me apart in order to save Mandy? Yeah. I was pretty sure I would. I didn’t like people—had never liked people—but individuals who stuck around long enough for me to start giving a damn were rare enough that I wanted to protect the ones I had. Lucas and Graham were going to need her once they figured out I was never getting out of here.

Graham. My eyes, which had somehow drifted shut again, snapped open. Graham had tracked down Jeff; Graham had suggested they use Mandy to infiltrate the facility where I was being kept. Graham was here. Maybe not physically, but close enough that any ramifications Mandy faced were likely to spill over onto him as well.

“Can’t… No.” I mumbled, and pushed myself up onto my elbows. My head spun. My veins felt like they’d been hollowed out and filled with sand, shifting through my body, weakening and wearing me away. Even the green patch on my arm hurt, a sharp, stabbing pain that only got worse when I straightened my arms and pushed myself onto my palms. I risked a glance at it, expecting to see the green gone sallow, or cracking with dehydration.

Instead, I saw green lines, like lightning strikes or veins, radiating out from the edges of the patch, lancing through the still-human skin around it. I made a low moaning noise. I was in distress: my body was reacting the only way it knew how. By changing. My blood had still been red when they’d started taking it away. Had these people syphoned off some irreplaceable percentage of my humanity, forcing me to embrace the reality of my roots faster than I should have?

Chillingly, the thought was accompanied by a question: if they could force the change, how long before they would start cutting off strips of my skin to see whether they could observe the blossoming from peach to green?

I had to get out of here. I had to get out of here, and I had to get Mandy out of here, while there was still a chance I could pass for human. The chair I’d fallen out of was on its side, but that actually made it slightly better for my purposes. I gripped the edge of it, pushing it down against the floor as I pushed myself up. My head throbbed. The room spun. And just like that, I was standing.

My feet felt like they were rooted to the floor. I glanced down, almost afraid to find they had done exactly that: grown roots and anchored themselves fast, becoming immoveable. They were still just feet, human-seeming, with bare toes pressed flat against the linoleum. If there was a green tint around the edges of my toenails, I could ignore it for now. I needed to get out of here.

The door was even farther away than the bed had seemed when I was in the chair. What’s more, I knew it was locked, and even if I’d known how to pick a lock, I didn’t have anything to pick a lock with. This was hopeless. I was helpless.

I took a step toward the door. It felt like falling, like I was pitching forward until my leg reconnected with the floor and caught me. I stopped for a moment, taking a deep breath and bracing myself to do it again. And again. And again. After four steps, I was exhausted, my head hurt even worse than it had before, but I was almost to the door. One more step. One more chance to fall.

I didn’t fall. My hands struck the door, palms out and open to catch me, and I stopped, simply blinking at the wood in front of me. I was here. I had no idea what to do next.

“Oh, what the hell,” I muttered, and tried the knob.

It turned without resistance. I took a stumbling step back, not letting go, and the door came with me, swinging smoothly on its hinges. On the other side was a plain white hall, unornamented, and occupied only by a slim, black-haired woman in nursing scrubs.

Mandy stared at me for a moment, the lockpicks she’d used to make this miracle possible still held in front of her. Slowly, she lowered them, blinking. I blinked back.

“Uh,” I said. “Hi. Have you been feeding my cat?”

“Your cat is an asshole, ” she said, voice shaking. Shoving the lockpicks into her pocket, she lunged forward and pulled me into an embrace. I smelled the sweet apple shampoo she always carried with her on trips, and the hot, anxious animal smell of her sweat.

Wait. Sweat? She was wearing deodorant—I could smell that, too, more clearly than anything except for the shampoo. How could I smell her sweating?

And why did it smell so good ?

“He wouldn’t eat for like, a week, and he peed in Lucas’s shoes,” she said, pushing me out to arm’s length and looking me frankly up and down. “I think he’s going to leave hairballs in your bed every night for the rest of your life. What the hell do you think you’re doing, getting arrested by NASA instead of coming home?”

Arrested by… My eyes widened, and I tried to pull away from her. “What are you doing here? You can’t be here, it’s not safe.”

“Why, because the people who think shooting another satellite into orbit is super fancy might come to check on me? Please.” Mandy rolled her eyes. “They don’t even have cameras on this hallway.”

“They have cameras on my room.”

“Which are currently showing a nice loop of you passed out on the floor, drooling. Nice touch, by the way.”

“It wasn’t a nice touch. I passed out from blood loss.”

“Still makes you look like you’re going to be out for hours, which is what we need right now. Not that we’re going to have hours. We’re not even going to have fifteen minutes, if you keep standing around like this. Come on.” She grabbed my arm and began tugging me down the hall.

Maybe it was the confusion and maybe it was the blood loss, but I let her take me, leading me past several identical, unmarked doors until she reached one that had been propped open with a brick.

“Through here,” she said, hip-checking the door open to reveal a gloomy stairwell. It extended both up and down from where we were standing: this facility was larger than I had originally assumed. That was a sobering thought. If I had somehow managed to make it out on my own, I could have been wandering in here for days.

“I don’t think I can do stairs right now, Mandy,” I said, bracing myself against the wall with my left hand. This had the awkward side effect of exposing the green streak running along the inside of my elbow. I thought about pulling it back. I didn’t. I needed the balance, and more, Mandy needed to see what she was trying to save.

I wanted her to stay my friend. I wanted her to love me the way she always had, the simple, unornamented love of close friends. And I wanted her to run as far and as fast as she could, because it wasn’t safe to be around me. Not anymore; not now that the invasion was on its way.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I checked the testing roster. You’ve got another hour before anyone is scheduled to check on you. These people…” She shook her head. “They don’t deserve to own a turtle, much less have custody of a person. They should have stuck with spaceships. At least those are harder to kill by accident.”

I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. “They haven’t killed me.”

“Not for lack of trying. You’re… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’re a plant, Stasia. A green, growing, oxygen-producing plant. You need sunlight and fresh water and not to have people sucking your blood out like a bunch of giant asshole mosquitos.” Mandy made a sour face. “I don’t have a fucking clue how your biology works, and I still know keeping you in a windowless room and feeding you cafeteria meals isn’t a good way to keep you healthy.”

Slowly, I blinked at her. “I didn’t think about sunlight.” Did I need sunlight? Did I photosynthesize? “I live in Seattle. The sun doesn’t shine half the year.”

“But plants still grow. A cloud cover doesn’t mean there’s no sun, just that the sun isn’t getting through as well as it would in, say, a desert.” She fished her phone out of her pocket, checking the screen, and pulled the stairwell door more tightly closed. “The lights are going to go out in a second. Stay quiet, and don’t panic. This is all part of the plan.”

“There’s a plan? Was anybody going to tell me that there was a plan?”

She smiled quickly. “There’s a plan.”

The lights went out.

The stairwell was plunged into immediate, absolute darkness. There was a rustle as Mandy stepped closer, clapping her hand over my mouth just before the wail of an alarm split the silence. It was loud enough to make my head, which had never stopped throbbing, hurt even worse; I moaned before I could think better of the sound, and was suddenly glad for Mandy’s muffling palm. I shrank back against the wall like I could somehow physically move away from the alarm. It didn’t help. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. If I moved, I would either collapse or fall down the stairs. Either way, I was going to be in an even-worse position than I was already.

The door opened.

Dim, watery light spilled into the stairwell. Mandy shoved herself closer to the wall, hauling me with her, and the door blocked us from the view of whoever was there.

“Clear,” snapped a voice. My nameless agent friend. “Keep moving.”

The door slammed shut. Mandy didn’t move. Five seconds later, the door slid more slowly open, and someone stepped into the stairwell. I closed my eyes against the dark, waiting for the bullet, waiting for the blow, and smelled chicory and moss, a sharp, vegetable combination that reminded me of sleeping forests and green places.

I opened my eyes.

“Rampion,” said a soft voice.

“Fiddleferns,” Mandy replied.

The door closed again, this time with the newcomer on our side. Still soft, the voice asked, “Is she awake?”

“I am,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Not important.”

I swallowed a flood of irritation. It damn well was important. If I was being asked to trust somebody, I wanted to know who they were. This spy bullshit was a waste of time, and it was going to get us all killed.

It had also gotten me out of the room where I’d been held for the last however long, and gotten me closer to freedom than I’d ever expected to be again. I glanced uneasily in Mandy’s direction, even though she couldn’t see me any more than I could see her, and asked, “So what is important?”

“Getting out of here.” There was a click as our guest turned on their flashlight. The beam was aimed at the floor, but there was enough backlight for me to recognize—

“Lucas! What are you doing here?”

“The usual. Saving your ass. Trying not to get thrown into a dark hole by NASA.” He grimaced. “That last one is a little more important than usual at the moment. Can we move? We should move.”

“You’re the one with the flashlight,” said Mandy. “You lead.”

Lucas nodded, angling the beam onto the steps, and we began to move, leaving the roar of the alarm and the sound of running feet behind.