Page 21 of Overgrowth

Chapter 10

Tucson, Arizona: July 28, 2031

Ten days pre-invasion

1.

NASA’s alien-containment facility had definitely been designed by the lowest bidder. We continued down the stairs for what felt like a year, until we reached an imposing door. It was banded with metal and had a bulky keypad next to it, the sort of thing that belonged in a 1980s movie about nuclear bunkers and the Cold War.

Lucas pushed the door with his foot. He didn’t even touch the knob. It swung open easily. I stared, first at it and then at him.

“They never got around to installing locks in the sub-basement,” he said flatly. “I guess they figured a bunch of guards drawn from a non-military clerical pool and a team of scientists who thought aggression was something to safely observe from a distance would never let a prisoner get this deep.”

It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d started our descent. I swallowed, and said, “You don’t sound like you approve.”

“It’s bad design,” he said. “Never construct a prison you can’t actually use for its intended purpose.”

“Lucas—” I reached for his arm.

“No.” He shrugged off my hand, turning his face away so that I couldn’t see his expression. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to do this right now.”

“I’ve got you,” said Mandy, sliding her arm around my back, so that her hand was in my right armpit and my left arm was slung around her shoulders. It was the sort of hold that people use for someone with a sprained ankle, and it provided a surprising amount of support. I leaned in to her gratefully, trying not to dwell on Lucas’s reaction.

It wasn’t working. He wasn’t looking at me. He’d been willing to come here, to help break me out—that meant he couldn’t hate me for telling him the truth, right? We’d known each other for years. We were friends. And I had never lied to him, not once.

But maybe that didn’t matter. Graham’s family hadn’t sought out his company in years. They still believed he was lying, that one day he was going to wake up and announce he was tired of pretending to be something he wasn’t and go back to being their good little girl. He had never lied to them about anything that mattered. Maybe he’d lied about who ate the last cookie when he was a kid or why he’d been twenty minutes late for curfew, but those weren’t real. They mattered in the moment, not in the grand sweep of a lifetime. Those weren’t lies that got held against him.

The truth, though… the truth was something they couldn’t seem to forgive. Maybe Lucas was going to be the same way with my truth. It had been fine as long as he’d been able to pretend it wasn’t real, that I was lying for my own amusement, and now that it was real…

I tightened my grip on Mandy’s shoulder, letting her pull me down the long, dark tunnel toward freedom, and tried to think about a future where I wasn’t this dizzy, where my friends didn’t need me to be a liar if they were going to love me.

I don’t know how long we walked. I think I passed out at one point, still walking but no longer aware. The air rang with the distant sound of rattling petals, a sound that faded into footsteps on concrete and then back out again. The smell of alien greenery washed over me, only to be replaced by wet stone and Mandy’s shampoo. It was like moving through a nightmare, unwaking, unable to free myself.

Then a rectangle opened in the wall of the world, and light spilled in. Real light, not bright, but vital and alive. Mandy hoisted me a little higher, and we walked together into the moon-washed strip of pasture outside the concealed back entrance to the facility where I’d been held. I blinked repeatedly, trying to get my eyes to adjust.

Gradually, a landscape appeared. We were standing in a divot carved out of a larger hillside, ringed on all sides by dense trees. The ground was covered in patchy grass, the sort of thing you’d see after a bunch of cows had been through. I spotted the first cow patty a moment later.

“Private grazing land,” said Lucas, confirming my suspicions. “There’s not a lot of it out here, but there are farmers almost anywhere you go. No good mining rights, so they sublet a large percentage of their underground to the government.”

And no one would look for a secret NASA facility under a bunch of hungry cows. “Smart,” I said, and closed my eyes again, breathing in the scent of a green, living world. Even the distant smell of cow seemed pleasant after the sterile confines of the NASA holding cell.

“We need to keep moving,” said Mandy. “They’re unprepared, not stupid. Someone’s going to check the fire exits, if they haven’t started already.”

“This way,” said Lucas.

We walked across the cow pasture as fast as my condition allowed. I opened my eyes occasionally, watching the world flicker by, and I let myself be led. No matter how Lucas felt about me now, I trusted him. I trusted Mandy. And if they were leading me to my death, at least I would die outside, in the company of moonlight and trees.

The ground changed underfoot. I stumbled, looking down, and realized we had crossed onto a gravel road. Deep ruts ran down either side of it, marking the places where trucks had passed. I groaned. Mandy flashed me a quick, encouraging smile.

“Almost there, pumpkin,” she said. “Hold on, and soon we’ll have the best medical care we can give you.”

“How?” asked Lucas. “We don’t have a botanist on staff.”

Mandy glared. We kept walking.

The road was harder to walk on than the fields. The gravel turned under my feet, and the smoothness of most of the surface made the dips a more unpleasant surprise. Still, we stuck to it, following it around a shallow bend into the shadow of the nearby trees. There, parked off to one side with the doors standing open, was a black van with tinted windows. And standing by the bumper was—

“Graham!” I tried to pull away from Mandy, intending to run to him.

Grip firm but calm, she tugged me back. “No,” she said. “If you trip and scrape all the skin off your face, we’re going to need to buy a lot of foundation. No one has the budget for that. I’ll get you there.”

She kept walking, carrying me along with her. Graham stepped away from the van, and she let go, letting me literally fall into his arms.

Like Mandy, he smelled of soap and shampoo and sweat. I’d never noticed how strongly mammalian he smelled before. I inhaled, and flinched as my mouth started watering.

“Hey, baby,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. “Let’s get you out of here.”

He swept me off the ground into a bridal carry, cradling my head against his shoulder. I let my eyes drift closed, and this time, when the world slipped away, I didn’t try to hold on to it. I was safe. Whatever else I might be, I was safe.

The last thing I was aware of was Graham hoisting us both into the van and the engine coming on, setting the metal vibrating around us. Then I knew nothing at all, and I was glad of it.

2.

“—not human.” Lucas’s voice was pitched low, possibly in the hope that I wouldn’t be awake enough to hear him. Poor guy. If he’d talked a little faster, I probably wouldn’t have been. Everything still felt fuzzy, like it had been wrapped in too much cotton. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“You did it.” Mandy sounded crisply annoyed. It was familiar enough to be soothing. She always sounded like the queen of efficiency when she was mad. “You get to be an enemy of the state just like the rest of us.”

“Only because I was going to be arrested for being her housemate anyway,” he snapped.

“Liar.” Now Mandy sounded sad. I felt a hand stroke my forehead. I assumed it was hers. “You came because you love her; again, just like the rest of us. You can have cold feet if you want. It won’t change anything that happened.”

“Have you looked at her arm?” Lucas demanded. “She looks like a—”

“Don’t.” Graham’s admonition was soft. “You don’t get to say those things.”

The world wasn’t vibrating anymore. The van had stopped moving. Were we even still in the van? Slowly, I forced my eyes open and found myself looking at exposed wood beams below a ceiling covered in white flocked stucco. It looked like something that had escaped from the late seventies by the skin of its teeth, old and unchanged and refusing to be judged. I blinked.

Graham’s face appeared above mine, a strained smile on his lips. “Hey, you,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“I…” I stopped. How was I feeling? Still dizzy, but not as bad as I had been. It was like waking from a bad cold to find that my fever had broken in the night. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll go tell Jeff she’s awake,” said Mandy, rising from her seat next to me and walking quickly away.

“Where’s Lucas?” I whispered.

“Here,” said Lucas, from somewhere off to my left. “You’re awake.”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been awake?”

I wanted to close my eyes. I couldn’t. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to see Graham anymore, and I’d been so sure I’d never see him again that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Long enough,” I said. “I’m sorry you had to break the law for an alien.”

Graham scowled. “Don’t apologize. You stayed there to save me.”

“Not just… Where are Toni and David? Are they here?”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “I think they’re trying to stop the invasion by infiltrating your ranks. It’s sort of cute, in a deeply delusional way.”

“Toni slipped me a twenty and asked me to buy her some weed killer the last time I went to the store,” said Mandy. “I’m really not sure what she thinks that’s going to accomplish.”

“NASA is trying to do the same thing, only they’re making their weed killer from my blood.” I thought about sitting up. It seemed like a bad idea. It also seemed like the sort of thing that was only going to get harder if I let myself keep putting it off. In the end, I sat up, and groaned. “I feel awful.”

“Same amount of awful, or less awful?” asked Graham.

“Less awful,” I admitted.

“That’s my fault,” said Jeff. I turned. He was stepping into the room, with Mandy close behind him. I stared.

The bandage was gone, exposing the smooth expanse of green skin covering the entire left side of Jeff’s face. His eye was still there, but the sclera had turned a pale jade, and his iris was a bright neon lime. Even a streak of his hair had turned green, so dark that it could almost blend into the black around it.

He smiled and asked, “Not quite what you were expecting?”

“What happened?”

“Time.” He shrugged. “Once the process starts, it doesn’t stop. It can be put temporarily on hold by outside forces—your blooming doesn’t appear to have progressed as much as it should have, probably because they were shielding you from us—but it doesn’t go away, and it doesn’t go back. Humanity was only ever a husk for us.”

I bit my lip and didn’t say anything. Graham’s hand settled over mine, a warm weight that clasped and held fast.

“What…” My throat was dry. I swallowed and tried again. “What do you mean, it’s your fault I feel less awful?”

He held up his right arm. There was a cotton ball taped there, surrounded by radiating lines of green. The sight made me want to look at my own arm, to see how much of the skin had lifted up and peeled away. I didn’t. Knowledge was something else that couldn’t be taken back. I wanted to put it off for as long as I possibly could.

“We don’t appear to have blood types—sap types—the way humans do. Your blood mimics type A when it’s red, so I couldn’t have given you a blood transfusion, but once we filtered the remaining blood out of my sap, I was able to donate nearly a full pint. Tahlia will be doing the same, when she wakes up. That should get you almost back to normal.”

“Tell her about the ‘almost,’” said Graham softly.

Jeff scowled. “I’m not sure she’s awake enough for that.”

“She deserves to know.”

I looked back and forth between the two of them as I tried to determine exactly what it was that they were trying to hide—or not hide—from me. “Tell me what?” I finally asked, gaze settling on Jeff. “What did you do?”

“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’m about to do.” He held up his other hand, showing me a cooler. “We’ve been networking while you were in custody. It was helpful, actually, having you under lock and key. Not because we didn’t miss you—we did—but because it meant we had proof the humans were starting to see us as a real threat.”

“Tahlia mentioned something about passing information along.”

“She found me through a pair of intermediates. She’s a forestry worker, you know, with a botany degree. Currently on indefinite leave from her job due to an undisclosed medical problem.”

Lucas scoffed. “Undisclosed, my ass. She’s green. ”

“Which is normal and natural for her,” said Jeff implacably. “She’s been researching our biology for years. She may have been the first of us to know for sure that we weren’t kidding when we told people we were aliens. Having the ability to run invasive medical tests on herself helped. If we’d all had access to fully equipped labs, we might have figured certain things out years ago.”

I didn’t say anything. He was talking around something. The green skin of his right cheek had a darker tint to it that matched the human-looking flush on his right. Whatever this was, it didn’t make him comfortable: not yet.

“Photosynthesis was never going to be enough for plants with your size and energy needs,” said Graham. Jeff almost looked relieved to have the reins of the conversation taken away from him. “Trees can do it, but they have extremely slow metabolisms, and they depend on very specific soil and water conditions. You… you’ve been a plant this whole time, and yet you move as fast as a mammal. You burn hot and have a very high energy requirement. There was no way you could do that and not need something… well, else. ”

“We think—Tahlia thinks, and I agree—the human shells we’ve been growing inside have been sustaining us this entire time. We constructed a crude machine from the people we used as our imprints, and that machine was enough to keep us healthy until the blooming began.”

I blinked slowly. “Like the yolk in a chicken’s egg?”

“Very much like,” Jeff agreed. “It was a self-replicating system, until it took too much damage. My system is in the process of shutting down. Yours has failed.”

My stomach clenched painfully. “What does that mean? Am I going to die?”

“No, sweetie.” Graham kissed my temple. “Keep listening.”

“Fortunately for us, Tahlia disabled her own support system several weeks ago, to see what would happen. The blooming accelerates after the supports are gone, giving way to a process she calls ‘flowering.’ Because of that accelerated process, it’s not possible to bring the supports back. There’s no room for them.”

I scowled. “This is a lot of prologue. I’d like the text, please.”

“Your body needs blood to live. You don’t make blood anymore.” Jeff walked over and set the cooler next to me. “We’re carnivorous plants. Hooray for us. I suppose all those Little Shop of Horrors jokes Toni was making weren’t too far off after all.”

I stared at him.

“Stasia named her cat ‘Seymour,’” commented Mandy. “Think she knew on some level?”

“She knew she wasn’t a vegan, and she knew she liked her meat rare,” said Graham. They both had a teasing, jocular note in their voices, like they’d known how difficult this was going to be for me, and wanted to make sure I came through it as easily as possible.

“We eat people ?” I squeaked.

“What did you think you were invading our planet for? The weather?” Lucas finally moved toward me, a scowl on his face and his hands balled into fists. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d seen him that angry. “You’re coming here to eat us. To steal our world and eat us. How do you think that makes us feel?”

“I never lied to you.”

“You didn’t say ‘Hi, my people are on their way to eat you,’ either.”

“Ignore Lucas, he’s in a bad mood because Roxanna told everyone he’d been harboring an alien in his house, and that makes him a sympathizer.” Mandy looked coolly at Lucas as she spoke. “Then she dumped him. In the middle of a dinner party. It was incredibly embarrassing, and if I were him, I’d probably still be locked in my room. But he’s not, because his friend was in trouble, and he needed to help. He’s not as much of a dick as he seems, even if he is pissed off.”

“I didn’t know we were coming here to eat you,” I said. I stroked the cooler unconsciously. It wasn’t hard to guess what had to be inside, not with all this talk of blood. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea.”

“Do you think that makes it better?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t even know what day of the week it is, or where the invasion is, or when it’s going to happen.” Part of me—a large part of me—hoped it would happen soon. I could no longer pass for human without a long-sleeved shirt, and a glance at Jeff’s green face was enough to tell me even that wouldn’t be enough for much longer. My time as a member of this planet’s dominant species was slipping away, replaced by new identity as an invader.

“It doesn’t.”

“I… I never lied to you.”

“I know.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair, looking down at the floor. “And that’s why I’m here, really. You’re my friend, Stasia. My annoying friend who likes shitty music and never remembers to unload the dishwasher. I’m having a little trouble reconciling it with you also being… that.” He waved a hand vaguely at the streak of green on my arm, indicating and denying it at the same time. “I’m trying.”

“He has to, since we can’t allow him to leave,” said Jeff. “Open the cooler.”

I opened the cooler.

Inside were several bags of red liquid that my brain initially insisted on reading as fruit punch. I picked one up. It was cool to the touch, and squelched oddly in my hand.

Blood, I thought. You’re holding a bag of human blood. Of course it had to be human. If it had been anything else, Mandy wouldn’t have been so pale. Lucas would have been willing to look at me.

Only Graham was still looking at me the way he always had, with love and sincere concern, like he believed I was a human being and deserved to be treasured like one. Or… maybe he’d never believed I was a human being. Maybe I’d been lucky enough to fall in love with one of the only people in the world who understood what it was to tell the truth about your identity, over and over again, until you found the few people who could believe in you.

Well, I was about to test that belief. The blooming wasn’t going to stop, and if it was going to give way to the flowering—whatever that was; if it was a more extreme form of what I was already going through, I couldn’t imagine it was pleasant either to experience or to watch. The blooming hadn’t hurt so far. It was pins and needles and itching, and the sensation of my humanity—which I’d never asked for but had always been able to count on—dropping away to reveal the invader underneath. Jeff said we would always look vaguely human, the consequence of sprouting and growing to maturity in these forms, but how did he know? Honestly, how could he know? He had as much information as any of us: his own experiences and whatever he’d been able to glean from talking to people in the forest. But they knew as much as we did. It was a vicious cycle.

What was coming might hurt or it might not. Might leave me recognizable and might not. Honestly, my real concern was whether it would make me dangerous… and whether it would drive away the people who’d been willing to come this far to help me. So I looked at the first bag of blood, and then I looked at Graham, and finally I turned to Jeff.

“If this is what I need, I guess I don’t have much of a choice about that,” I said. “What do I do?”

Jeff wrinkled his nose, clearly uncomfortable with whatever he was about to say. That actually helped. If Jeff, who was shunting off his humanity as quickly as he could, didn’t want to tell me what came next, at least that meant I wasn’t going to be the only one who didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t going to be suffering alone.

“You drink it,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Wait.” I stared at him. “We’re going full Little Shop of Horrors here? Blood? We’re vampire plants from outer space?”

“Actually, H. G. Wells did it long before those science fiction hacks,” said a familiar voice. I turned. Toni was strolling into the room, David a living wall behind her, a cat-in-the-cream expression on her face. “Finally embracing your roots, are you, Miss Miller? I guess it was inevitable. You’re all going to reveal yourselves as the aliens you are, and we’re going to sit back and watch the world turn against you.”

“You talk like a supervillain, and yet you’re still with us,” I said. “That’s a little self-contradictory, don’t you think?”

“No better place to be than the bosom of the enemy,” she said.

“Plus, we can’t go back to Maine,” said David. “The government shut down the observatory. Mr. Fabris is fighting it as best he can—less because they’ve inconvenienced his daughter, and more because they’ve touched his stuff—but they’re claiming national security. If they’d let us into the think tanks working to thwart the alien menace, we’d be there instead, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “They think we’re collaborators.”

“We weren’t free for twenty-four hours before I started seeing people following us on the street, and half of them were even real,” said Toni, in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. “I have enough trouble leaving the house without being followed by government agents looking to do me harm. Can you imagine how quickly I’d lose my shit if I went wandering around in the open? No, thank you. I’ll stay here where it’s safe, and observe you fuckers learning your own biology. That way, when NASA is ready to play ball and treat me right, I’ll know everything there is to know.”

“Mmm,” said Jeff. His lips were a thin slash across his face, and I got the feeling Toni was going to find leaving more difficult than she assumed.

Leaving… “Where are we?”

“Drink your breakfast and I’ll explain,” said Graham. I turned to stare at him. This was blood in my hand, human blood, and he was telling me to drink it like… what? Like it was nothing, no big deal, his girlfriend had always been a vampire perennial from beyond the stars?

Except I had been. He had always known that. He was just one of the people who’d decided to believe me.

“It’s okay, honest,” he said, apparently taking my silence for displeasure. “I donated it. Not all at once, but… we started figuring out what you were going to need pretty quickly, and then Tahlia joined us and confirmed what Jeff and I already suspected. We’ve been putting blood aside for you ever since. You need to be healthy if you’re going to deal with this bullshit.”

“Not sure I’d call an alien invasion ‘bullshit,’ but sure,” said Toni cheerfully.

That was it: the last straw. My head was throbbing, my arm was aching, and I could almost feel the dead skin around the puncture wounds in my elbow beginning to detach and peel away, becoming nothing more than medical waste. I hoisted the bag of blood, popped open the seal, and raised it to my lips.

It tasted the way I’d always assumed the air at Disneyland would taste, back when I’d been a kid and the fact that I was an alien invader didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to go on vacation. It tasted like ice cream and rainbows and lazy afternoons, like bacon dipped in frosting, like every good thing in the universe. It tasted like stardust, like I was drinking stardust, and before I had time to even register the first swallow, Jeff was there, plucking the emptied husk out of my hand and replacing it with a plump, unopened bag.

“Keep going,” he said.

I obeyed without stopping to think about the humans around us, or what they might think of this scene. I had been given permission to glut myself, and that was exactly what I was going to do.

The second bag of blood tasted faintly different—cotton candy instead of funnel cake, early morning instead of late after noon. I made a wordless, quizzical sound. Jeff, still standing in front of me, nodded enthusiastically.

“That’s from another donor,” he said. “The first one was from Graham, and this one is from Amanda.”

“Mandy,” said Mandy sharply.

“Whatever,” said Jeff.

I took another long gulp, drinking the essence of the woman who had been my friend and housemate for so many years. She tasted amazing. If all humans tasted this good, we were going to have a real problem convincing the invading armada not to eat them. If that was even possible. Would the humans agree to some sort of mass blood drive in exchange for us not swallowing them whole?

“That should be enough for now.” This time, when Jeff took the empty pouch from my hand, he didn’t replace it. I started to reach for the cooler. He whisked it out of my grasp with a shake of his head.

I glared. “Why did you do that?”

“Because you need to give your system time to adjust,” he said. “Your stomach is still largely modeled on the human digestive system. It isn’t set up to deal with blood. If you drink too much, it will make you sick, and that will be a waste of a limited resource.” He glanced meaningfully at Toni. My blood-filled stomach lurched.

Human blood wouldn’t stay a limited resource if we got hungry enough. There were lots of humans around, at least for the moment. Living humans who were willing to donate their blood, on the other hand…

We could eat all of those in less time than it took to decide we were going to do it.

“Oh, hell.” I dropped my head into my hands. “When did everything get so complicated ?”

“When you kickstarted this whole adventure by eating a kid,” said Toni, almost cheerfully. “If you hadn’t done that, things would have stayed real simple.”

“If she hadn’t done that, she would have eaten someone else,” said a new voice—Tahlia’s voice, transposed from the forest, where she could have passed for a safe hallucination, into the real and material world. I didn’t bother uncovering my face. I knew what she looked like under the skin, in the space where the alien flowers bloomed. No matter what she looked like here, that would be the face that mattered. “Once we germinated, our course was set.”

“So you’ve said,” replied Lucas tightly. “I don’t see it.”

“We’re not thinking creatures when we sprout, not as you measure the concept. We grow with the mindless needs of the young. We hunger, and so we eat. We yearn to be more than we are, and so we implant upon something that can carry us to greatness.”

“Wait.” I lifted my head. “How does that work? We come from another planet? What did we eat there?”

“Something else,” said Tahlia, and smiled. “Hello, Stasia. I’m glad to see you well.”

I said nothing. Only looked at her, and saw my future.

There was no human skin left on her face, only the smooth green that was spreading over Jeff—that would soon be spreading over me, once it made its way from my arm to my torso. Like him, her eyes were green. Unlike him, her teeth had been replaced, becoming hard, woody squares that looked like polished bone. A streak of her hair had somehow become long, twining vines no bigger around than a thread, covered in small, bright green leaves.

Her smile widened as she saw me looking. “Do you like it?” she asked. “Jeffrey mentioned you were concerned about losing your human form. I assure you, it will stay, and be replicated as closely as the vegetable world allows.”

“Because that’s not a mockery of humanity or anything,” muttered Toni.

“We don’t need you all,” said Jeff sharply.

Graham took my hand and squeezed it. “You’re wrong,” he said. “The invasion is coming. Your people look almost as human as we do. And how much do you really know about the aliens, huh? You were born here. You don’t remember anything but here. Maybe they’re not going to be so kind to you. Maybe you were just canaries, meant to show them whether or not they could survive our world.”

There was a certain insidious appeal to his words. If we assumed the armada was not going to be on our side, we could join forces with the humans who were inevitably going to form a resistance. We could be the good guys when the dust settled, the new Vegetable Americans taking our oaths of citizenship and helping to make this country great. Although Tahlia was Canadian, so she might not go for that. And according to Toni’s research, there had been seeds all over the world, which meant a lot of countries would need to agree not to punish us for coming from another planet and eating kids before we had the brains to stop ourselves. And—

And people would still taste like summer vacation felt when I was a kid, and I would still know that we were lying to ourselves. The armada didn’t send us here because they wanted to betray us. I might not have a clear idea of why they did send us—not yet—but I knew it had been for a good reason, and I knew we still belonged to them. The forest, with its reassuring rustling leaves and beds of welcoming flowers, was proof enough of that.

No species that dreamt of a place like that, of a communal peace so strong it endured even over gulfs of space and time, could ever throw its children away. We would be alien to our ancestors when they arrived here, as alien to them as they were certainly going to be to us, but we would all be the same in the forest, and we would all have the space we needed to understand.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” I said, delicately tugging my hand out of Graham’s. He looked at me with bewilderment, but he didn’t try to hold me when I clearly wanted him to let go. “They wanted us to be here when they arrived. We’re not just atmosphere testers.”

“If we were, they wouldn’t have needed to send seeders,” added Tahlia. “They could have planted ordinary trees to test the environment here. For all we know, they did. Maybe there’s a strange tree in every forest on this planet, something that shouldn’t be there, comfortably growing, proving the soil here is good for us.”

“And it’s not like you’ve been chowing down on people this whole time.” Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at Toni. She shrugged, unrepentant. “If the scouts were just supposed to confirm that hey, this place can support life, they would have fallen, sprouted, had no one to teach them how to be whatever the hell you people are, eaten as many humans as they could get their vines on, and then died in a hail of gunfire. Instead, you were designed to sprout, infiltrate, and thrive. Almost every death I’ve documented among your number has been a consequence of allergic shock.”

“Makes sense,” said Graham. “Even on this planet, you run into issues with people from one continent not being able to eat fruit from another continent, or developing a nasty intolerance to unfamiliar foods after one or two exposures. Allergies should be a serious concern when you’re talking about interstellar differences.”

“Cats,” I said abruptly. The rest of them turned to look at me. I shrugged, feeling suddenly awkward. “I was… We always had a cat when I was a kid. Then I went away to college, and I didn’t have a cat anymore, and when I went home for Christmas break, I had an allergic reaction to the cat. I had to reacclimatize after I graduated, before I could adopt Seymour.” My eyes widened. I stood, or tried to, anyway; I actually wobbled, nearly falling, before Graham could pull me back into a seated position. “If you’re all here, where is Seymour? Who’s feeding him?” My furry little asshole could starve to death two feet away from an open bag of cat food. If it wasn’t in his dish, it didn’t exist.

“Roxanna,” said Lucas.

Now it was my turn to stare at him. He squirmed. “I know you don’t like her, and she doesn’t like you either, but you know she would never let anything hurt him. She’ll stand in front of the invasion and demand it back off until he gets his Fancy Feast.”

Tahlia started laughing helplessly. I glanced her way. She wiped a tear away from the one eye that still looked halfway human, shaking her head. “Oh, how human we become, and how human we remain,” she said. “Will you worry about missing next season’s television? Or whether your library books verge on the overdue? We are at the cusp of a transformation. We begin to bloom. And all you care about is a cat.”

“Cats matter,” I said.

“For once, I agree with the salad bar,” said Toni. “Cats matter.”

Tahlia shook her head again, harder. “You may be proof that this invasion is doomed. Then again, you may be proof that we’ve already succeeded. I honestly don’t know. But I do know this: welcome home.”

She smiled. Hesitantly, I smiled back, and knew the world would never be the same again.

3.

Our safe house was located in Tucson, Arizona, just like the NASA facility where I’d been kept. With NASA locking down travel pathways, moving seemed like a bigger risk than holding still, especially since the relay network of scouts was finally beginning to pull itself together.

Each of us, according to Tahlia, had a “broadcast radius” of approximately three hundred miles, growing exponentially every time another mind was added to the group. With the three of us sharing one physical location, our personal pathway to the forest was almost three thousand miles in diameter. We could talk to our own kind all over North America, and as we made contact with them in the forest, we extended our range even further.

Given thirty of us in the right places, we could cover the entire planet. It was a daunting thought that held its own strange appeal. What would it be like to talk to members of my own species anywhere in the world? And when the invasion started, what would happen then? How far would we reach?

Would we reach the stars?

The safe house was about ten miles outside of the city proper, secured for our use by a staffer of the senator Tahlia mentioned before. Thanks to him, we had all the privacy we could ask for, along with a fence around the entire property and an empty swimming pool which Graham assured me was absolutely full of rattlesnakes during the day, when they came out to sun themselves on the tile.

We also had space enough for each of us to have our own room—and for about eight other people to have their own rooms, too. That made me more than nervous. It looked like we were planning to be here for a while, and to bring others here as well. We were digging in for the long haul… or at least until the sky went dark with alien ships, and the world changed forever.

The room I was going to be sharing with Graham was small and featureless. White walls, white curtains, a door connecting to the back yard and the aforementioned empty swimming pool, and a bed large enough to hold us both, plus another couple if we started running out of space.

Graham waited until I was seated on the bed before closing the door and turning to face me, his hands folded behind his back like he was getting ready for a job interview. “So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed.

“Did they hurt you?” He looked at me, eyes wide and pleading for a no. He’d always been easy to read, and right now, he might as well have been a billboard. “Those NASA bastards, did they hurt you? Did they… do anything?”

“They drew a lot of blood and took some skin and tissue samples, but they didn’t do anything I can’t recover from.” I glanced at my increasingly green arm and chuckled bitterly. “My human… Fuck, what do I even call it? Skin? Body? Cocoon? Whatever it is, it’s not going to recover nearly as well. Will you still love me when I’m an orchid?”

“You were always an orchid.” He crossed to sit next to me. “Well. Maybe not an orchid. Those are delicate and sort of hard to take care of. I always thought of you as more of a succulent or something in the climbing ivy family. You’re tougher than you think you are. Of course I still love you. I’ll love you even when you’re so green you can wear yellow lipstick as a neutral.”

“Mom’s going to have a fit.” I leaned over, resting my head against his shoulder.

“Can I be there when that happens? I love watching your mother freak out.”

“Sure.” I closed my eyes, trying to enjoy the closeness of him, rather than focusing on the enticingly spicy scent of his skin, like the best meal I had ever not allowed myself to eat.

I didn’t sleep much that night.