Page 24 of Overgrowth

Chapter 12

Tucson, Arizona: August 6, 2031

The last day before the invasion

1.

Somehow, they still didn’t know where we were.

The news had been filled with stories about aliens. After Agent Brown’s press conference got rebroadcast around the world—as Senator Davis had predicted it would be—people had put two and two together: signal from space plus aliens among us equaled invasion on the way, and extraterrestrial fever had gripped the world.

“We don’t need to destroy them,” Jeff had muttered, after the first riot had been reported on social media. “We need to sedate them so they don’t destroy themselves out of sheer… I don’t even know what this is.”

“Proof that they’re prey,” Tahlia had replied. “Proof that we’re right.”

Toni, who had been sprawled over the entire couch with a star chart and a highlighter, had sneered without responding.

That had been the house for the past week: lots of judgment, lots of silence, and lots of aimlessness. Senator Davis had moved in full-time, claiming to be able to serve his constituents just as well from Arizona as he could from Washington DC. David and Toni were working constantly on their star charts, convinced that if they could just figure out where the invasion was coming from, they could somehow make it go back.

After the third day, Graham had started hesitantly helping them. I should probably have been hurt by that, but honestly, it had been more of a relief than anything else. He had something to keep him busy while I was outside of his reach. More and more, all I wanted to do was sleep.

When I slept, everything was okay, because when I slept, I wasn’t part of a species coming to take over a world that didn’t belong to us. I was in a world that did belong to us. I was home.

With every passing night, the forest grew grander, the trees straining for the sky like gravity had been rescinded, the dragonfly-petaled flowers growing lusher and denser in their chiming groves. The sound of crystal petals knocking against each other was a constant now, lulling me to sleep and waking me in triumphant peals. There was a language there, something I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to, because it wasn’t for me. What the flowers said when they were alone was theirs. I didn’t need to share it to be grateful for its existence.

// here // they whispered, when I—when any of their bipedal children—drew close enough to converse. // here, welcome. coming, here. coming, soon. // Their language, strange and subtle as it was, was getting easier and easier to understand. All it cost was a few sheets of skin, peeling away while we slept, to be found like dried-out husks at the foot of the bed when the morning came.

We were blooming, all of us, faster and faster all the time. Even Tahlia, who insisted her own blooming was over, replaced by flowering—which seemed like basically the same thing to me, and maybe that just meant my own flowering hadn’t started yet, or maybe it meant I didn’t recognize it. Whatever the nomenclature, the process was definitely accelerating. My own skin was more than half-green, and while there were no mirrors in the forest, I knew I no longer looked even remotely human when I walked there by night. None of us did. As for what we were…

When I opened my eyes, it faded, replaced by a quiet sort of regret, like somewhere deep down, I was sad that I would never be made of twisting vines and trembling fonds. Like my bipedal, almost-human shape was somehow wrong. That was the worst part of all this. The feeling that I was wrong.

Outside our retreat, the whole world was looking for us, and for people like us. Our faces—mine, Graham’s, even Senator Davis’s—had appeared on the news a few times, circulated and recirculated through social media. Interestingly, Graham was branded as a possible alien, while the senator was labeled a sympathizer and possible traitor to his own kind. The intel these people were working from wasn’t perfect. And still they didn’t find us.

We were lucky that way. Some folks had vanished from the forest while their bodies were asleep, snatched from their beds while they were defenseless. Surprisingly few of them had been betrayed by their families or loved ones, possibly because, as we went, I was on the more social end. Three whole people—four, if I wanted to count Roxanna—had been primed to notice my disappearance. Most of the people I’d met in the forest hadn’t even had that much.

Maybe that, too, was part of the reason we’d been dropped here so far in advance of the armada. If the flowers in the forest were an accurate reflection of the flower that birthed me, it was easier for them to consume children. They were too small to duplicate a fully grown adult; it would have strained the resources of the root system past sustaining. So we all started out as children, seemingly human, inwardly alien, running across this strange new world with children’s eagerness to see everything, touch everything, learn everything. That was useful. That made us better at gathering the information the armada needed. But even the least social children are likely to have people looking out for them and taking care of them, making sure their daily needs were met—making sure their skin wasn’t falling off and revealing the green ripeness underneath. The invasion had been timed to give us all time to reach adulthood.

It was funny, in a way. The more I thought about the timing of things, the way it had all been laid out and double-designed, the more obvious it became that some things were universal. I could posit a hundred things about not only my own species but all the other aliens we had met and devoured as we made our relentless way across the cosmos. Life spans had to be roughly equivalent for the majority of sapient races, or else our planting season would have been wrong. Biology had to be similar enough to let us adapt, a few fatal allergic reactions notwithstanding.

We were the weeds of the universe, and if we could grow somewhere, then that place was similar to everyplace else we’d sprouted.

I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of blood mixed with orange juice and scrolling through the news reports on my tablet. Another six aliens had been captured. I recognized three of them from their locations, although their faces were too human to be familiar. In the forest, they were miracles of leaf and vine and flower, not glowering bipeds in handcuffs being shoved into the back of government vans.

Agent Brown was being smart about the arrests: I had to give her that much. Somehow, there was always someone standing by to capture the moment the “alien terrorists” were brought to justice, and somehow, the chaos of bringing them in always resulted in a torn sleeve or a missing jacket—anything to reveal the patches of green on their arms and throats. We came in every shade of the verdigris rainbow, from a green so pale it was almost like ivory to a green so dark it trended into black, and the photographers captured it perfectly, over and over again. See, said those pictures; see how unlike us they are. How strange, how foreign, how alien.

Human hate crimes were down, except for the part where most of the people being attacked because they were from outer space were actually from the apartment complex down the block, the one that had always been viewed as “other.” Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter anymore, because finally, there was some thing that could be hated without any consequences. We weren’t from around here. We didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

One man, upon seeing the first strips of green on his wife’s back, had set her on fire. They had been married for over a decade. According to the reports, his actions had been fully justified, and while he was likely to go to trial, he was unlikely to face any real consequences. Killing a walking, talking plant from space wasn’t murder, after all.

It was probably a good thing we were an armada and not a friendly diplomatic mission. By the time our ships got here, they were going to have so much to avenge.

The sound of someone walking down the hall got my attention. I raised my head and watched Mandy enter the room. The spring in her step was long since gone, replaced by a weary plodding so out of character that it hurt. She should have been home with her things and her coworkers, planning her costumes for the next con and keeping herself distracted from the impending alien invasion. She should have been, for this last little stretch of time, human. Instead, she was here, in a house packed with aliens and surrounded by desert, watching the world revile her before they even knew her name.

I felt bad for her. But not too bad. Of the two of us, she was the one who’d had a choice.

“Hey,” she said, when she saw me. “Any news?”

“Plenty,” I replied. “Not anything good, though, and not anything game-changing. They’ve caught three more of us; they’ve killed two.” I chuckled mirthlessly. “It’s funny, you know? None of them can say for sure that we killed the kids we replaced. Maybe we made the replacements at birth. Maybe we’re like the Midwich Cuckoos, and there were never any ‘real’ kids to swap out. But the second humans know we’re not, they’re happy to start with the murder.”

“You drink blood,” said Mandy. “You need it to live.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that.” We knew they didn’t because they hadn’t been broadcasting it on every news report. As soon as it got out that we were not only aliens, we were predators, it was going to be game over. The little rumbles of resistance from the fringe groups were going to stop, and it was going to be all anti-alien, all the time.

We were getting close to that point. All of us who were like Tahlia, flowering instead of blooming, had abandoned solid food entirely, subsisting on nothing but blood and the occasional sunbath. The fact that they could drink other kinds of blood didn’t mean they wanted to. The logic was straightforward: donations from our small supply of sympathetic humans were free and easily accessible, whereas pig or cow blood required going to the butcher and placing a special order. Harmless enough, done once, but over and over again, for weeks? Someone was going to get suspicious, if they weren’t already.

“How much time do you think we have left before the rest of your, you know”—Mandy waved vaguely at me—“before they get here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “No one knows. NASA has to be watching for them, right?”

“Sure, but they’re not going to tell us the danger is getting worse.” Mandy shook her head. “I still don’t understand their deal.”

“Their deal is, they stayed alive by taking any source of funding they could, and now they’re run by the people who’ve been sure for years that the aliens were coming to eat the world.”

Mandy laughed, small and bitter. “So NASA is the only government agency in the control of people who know what they’re talking about, is that what you’re saying?”

“I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” I started to reach for my juice and stopped myself, looking instead at the lines around her eyes, the pallor of her skin. She looked shaky. “How are you holding up?”

This time, her laughter wasn’t nearly as small. “Oh, I don’t know. My best friend is really a killer space fern, not just pretending to be, and now I’m helping protect a group of invaders from my own government while we wait for their armada to get here. Also, none of them actually know why they’re here, so maybe they want to be friends and maybe they want to slaughter my entire species, but hey. It’s not like I could leave if I wanted to, so I may as well sit back and enjoy the show. Did you know that I’ve been doing most of the grocery shopping? Half the people out here speak Spanish, so I blend better than Graham or Toni—not that she wouldn’t betray you for a shiny cereal-box badge—or David. Or God forbid, one of the green people. Do you know how much foundation makeup I’ve bought?” Her voice rose on the last question, ending in an almost hysterical peak.

“No,” I said cautiously. “I don’t. Mandy, is someone making you do something you don’t want to do?”

“No.” She looked at me, misery written clearly across her face. “Everything I’m doing, I’m doing of my own free will. I can’t even pretend you’re somehow compelling me, because I know I would do it even if you didn’t care. Even if you had another way. I love you and I want you to be safe and happy.”

I blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t, you jerk. You’ve never been good at friendship.” Mandy tried to smile. The expression died before it fully formed. “When I met you, I thought, ‘Wow, this is someone who’s excited about spending her whole life alone.’ If Graham hadn’t been so happy about having a girlfriend, I probably wouldn’t have given you a second look. You were almost violently antisocial. Don’t you remember?”

I remembered Mandy coming around with fast food and cans of soda, anime DVDs burned from streaming services and platitudes about how it wasn’t really piracy, not when they refused to sell it to her. I remembered her knocking on my dorm-room door for a year, until she didn’t have to knock anymore—until I’d given her a key more out of self-defense than anything else—and then somehow, when the next rooming lottery had come up, the two of us had been rooming together while my original roommate raced triumphantly toward her own friends, free of my lurking, gloomy presence at last.

What I couldn’t remember was the moment when we had decided to be friends, rather than people who kept crossing paths for some inexplicable reason. Graham and I had met through Carlos, who had been my friend mostly in self-defense: he and I had been partnered in our math labs, and if we hadn’t been able to get along, we would both have failed. So Carlos led to Graham, and Graham came as a package deal with Mandy, and Mandy had been dedicated enough to break through my shell of standoffishness and sarcasm.

Mandy looked at my frown and broke out laughing. It was the most sincerely amused sound I’d heard her make in almost a week. “I wish you could see your face right now,” she said. “What, do you not like hearing that you’re lousy at friendship?”

“I thought I was a pretty good friend,” I mumbled.

“Oh, you are. Once somebody convinces you to care, you’re an amazing friend. But sweetie, most people—human or not—don’t have a social circle they can count on the fingers of one hand. Most people go looking for folks they want to have in their lives.”

“I have more friends than that.”

“Now you do. Have you noticed you’re more tolerant with the green people? I can’t decide whether that’s because you feel trapped, or because you recognize your own kind.”

I opened my mouth. Then I paused to think about what I was going to say, leaned forward, and said, “I don’t actually like them very much. Tahlia makes me seem warm and fuzzy, the Senator is super bossy, and Jeff makes me uncomfortable. It’s like he thinks we’re going to start a whole garden of little plant-babies, just him and me.” I was the first female of his own kind that he’d ever seen, and he’d imprinted more than I was comfortable with. It would have been fine if he’d been flirting with Tahlia, or if he’d wanted to be friends, but no. Somehow Graham didn’t count, and I was still seen as available.

I was used to men assuming Graham didn’t count, once they found out where he’d come from. He’d broken a few noses in the process of defending me from men who thought I needed a “real dicking” before I’d thaw. I hadn’t broken any noses, but I’d slapped some faces, and on one occasion, bruised some balls. Self-defense and bigots, I could handle. Someone who thought my boyfriend didn’t matter because he was human… that was new.

If our species turned out not to be sexually dimorphic when not mirroring the human form, Jeff was going to be pissed.

Mandy clapped a hand over her mouth. “Really?” she said, through her fingers.

“Really-really,” I confirmed. “I can’t decide whether I come from a whole species of jerks, or whether we’ve all been alone—or mostly alone—for so long that none of us know how to play nicely, but whatever it is, they’re all sort of… weird.”

Mandy lowered her hand, looking like she was about to reply. Instead, she froze, going pale, and said nothing. I stiffened.

“We may be ‘weird,’ as you say,” said Jeff, mildly, “but we’re your peers, and we’re the ones who will leave this world by your side as we embark on our next great journey.” He placed his hands on my shoulders. I caught a flash of green out of the corner of my eye, but didn’t turn.

I knew what he looked like.

Before meeting Tahlia, we had both been blossoming at our own speed, losing pieces and patches of our human skins every day. Then she had walked in, and Jeff had risen to the challenge. He’d been drinking as much blood as he could get his hands on, bleeding himself until not a trace of red remained in his veins, and baking himself in the desert sun, forcing his body to photosynthesize. The end result was stunning.

While the rest of us still contended with the visual reminders of our fading humanity—even Tahlia, who had a few patches of her original olive complexion, a few locks of curly brown hair—Jeff had traded it all for clear green skin and fronded leaves that covered his scalp in careful imitation of hair. He smelled like sap and flowers. His feet were always bare, letting his rooted toes “taste” the ground as he walked. If he’d looked a little less human, he would have been miraculous. As it was, he looked just human enough to seem wrong. Looking at him for too long hurt my eyes. I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Mandy and the others.

“Nothing human will leave this planet,” he said, leaving his hands resting on my shoulders. His voice was the only part of him that hadn’t changed. If I didn’t look at him, he could have been as human as anyone. “Now’s the time to shed your attachment to that which bleeds red, because this is where we leave it all behind.”

He was wrong. I wanted to tell him that. I wanted to tell him that as long as he remembered the sunset in Oahu, as long as I could name every Star Trek captain in order, as long as Tahlia could make terrible jokes about house hippos, something of humanity would be leaving this planet even if we left the humans themselves behind. That’s the thing about cultural literacy: it doesn’t go away when it stops being useful. No matter how far out of childhood I’d grown, I’d never forgotten the theme songs of my favorite cartoons or the taste of Lucky Charms and orange juice, so wrong it became right. Whether we were human or not, we were taking them with us to the stars.

I didn’t say a word. Arguing with Jeff was never a good idea. As his metamorphosis progressed, his temper had grown shorter and his hatred for the humans around us—even the ones who were helping us—had grown stronger. There were days when I worried I’d get out of bed and find that he had painted the house red in blood. The only question was whether Toni’s cheerful in tent to betray us would beat out Lucas’s grim determination to survive in determining who he ate first.

“Senator Davis wants you, Stasia,” said Jeff, leaning harder on his hands, driving me deeper down into my seat. “Something about the signals your astronomer picked up this morning. He says it may be relevant. If you’re finished with your little girl-talk moment, we could go now.”

“What if I say I’m not?” I asked.

“Then we would still go now, but I would be unhappy with you,” said Jeff. “I would have to remember that you made me look silly in front of the senator, and I might not be on your side the next time there was something important to make a decision about.”

“Important how?” asked Mandy, in a small voice.

Jeff took his hands off my shoulders. “Eventually we’re going to have to decide which of you we’re going to eat,” he said calmly. “Five humans and four of us has been a good ratio so far, but as the flowering progresses, we’ll need more blood to fully transform. Someone will need to give more than they have been. You know what that means.”

“It means you don’t hurt my friends.” I shoved my chair back and stood, turning so my butt was pressed against the edge of the table and I was between Jeff and Mandy. “They are here because they wanted to help me. Helping me does not mean getting eaten by alien plants.”

“Not even if that’s the only way to help?” Jeff raised one delicate eyebrow. It was made of tiny root-like filaments, strikingly alien, even as it fit perfectly into the lines of his face. “They’re meat. You’re going to need to come to terms with that sooner or later. These people aren’t your kind anymore.”

I was horrifyingly aware of Mandy’s presence behind me, and of the lingering coppery taste of blood on my tongue. Whose was it? Was it hers? Was it Graham’s? Or was it someone else’s— voluntary or no? All five of our resident humans gave blood more often than was necessarily safe, even Lucas, who recognized that keeping the plants well fed might be the difference between a little blood and a lot of it. They dealt with dizziness and risked anemia to keep us healthy and functioning. And they knew it wouldn’t be long before more of us showed up here, or before more of us became like Jeff, unable to even supplement our diets with solid food.

Jeff looked at me and smirked. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Afraid I’ll hurt your little pet?”

“If you touch one hair on her head, I will march into the nearest town, buy all the weed killer they have, and test NASA’s theory about how to get rid of us.” My voice was steady. I was proud of myself for that. I was also pretty sure I was going to throw up when this was over. Nothing’s perfect. “The same goes for all my people. I may not be human anymore, but they are still my friends.”

“You were never human.”

“Uh, tell her something she doesn’t know?” Mandy’s interjection was enough of a shock that we both turned as she pushed her chair back and walked around the table, stopping next to me. She folded her arms, looking Jeff up and down before making a disgusted face, like she saw nothing in him worth favoring. “That was one of the first things she ever said to me. Hello, nice to meet you, I came from outer space. Probably going to invade your world. Then she ate my potato chips. So see, she’s been in my shit since day one. But she’s earned it. You haven’t.”

Jeff scowled. “I could have you bled dry.”

“You know, you keep saying that, and you keep not doing it. I can’t decide whether it’s because you know you can’t, or because you’re scared to try.” Mandy leaned a little closer to me, bumping me with her hip. “Stasia’d have your head if you made the attempt. My money’s on her.”

“I’m more developed than she is.”

“You’re greener. Whatever, Marvin the Martian. If green is the only thing that matters, Kermit is your lord and master, and he would never drain a girl’s blood just because she got tired of listening to a lesser Muppet talk shit.” She snorted. “You need us. You need blood and you can’t exactly go out on the street to get more, and that means you need us. So calm the fuck down.”

“Better willing donors than kidnap victims we’d have to monitor around the clock,” I said. “Mandy and the others have been giving you what you need to have. She’s right. Calm down.”

“They won’t be useful much longer,” said Jeff. His eyes went back to me, narrow and furious. “The senator wants you.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.” I took Mandy’s hand, holding it tightly. Jeff continued to glare, but he didn’t say anything about my bringing the human with me. He just turned and walked out of the room, leaving it up to us to follow.

2.

Senator Davis was sitting at a round table on the back patio, the sun beating down on him without obstruction. He had his increasingly green face tilted upward, a smile on his lips, like he had been thinking of nothing but this moment since getting out of bed. I stopped at the patio’s edge, trying to blink my surprise away.

The senator was no freer to move outside the house than the rest of us—the sudden appearance of an elected official wanted as a “person of interest” in the question of an alien invasion would have raised a few too many eyebrows—but he’d been keeping up his cosmetic regimen, covering his face every morning with carefully blended foundations and powders in case of a conference call. Officially, he was traveling on personal business, and while he had been refusing to report to DC to answer questions about the “alien menace,” he’d been taking video calls from his staff and his constituents. Right now, however…

His skin was a mellow green, shot through with delicate lines of buttercup yellow and sweet lime. It was a beautiful combination, and startlingly advanced. His hair looked like a wig set against all that green, and I was gripped by the sudden conviction that if I grabbed it and tugged, it would all come away, leaving only vines behind.

“Ah, Miss Miller,” said the senator, not opening his eyes. “You were so long, I had started to worry I might need to send out a search party.”

“Jeff decided now would be a great time to start threatening Mandy,” I said. Jeff shot me a sharp look. I did my best to ignore him. If this was going to happen, it was better to let it happen quickly. “So I’m sorry if we made you wait, but he needed to understand why that wasn’t okay.”

Senator Davis cracked open one eye, giving me an amused look. “Our people are on their way. Once they get here, all that is of Earth will be devoured, and we’ll make of this world a garden to grow us good food for the work ahead. Why should it matter if he threatens your friends, when we have a whole universe ahead of us?”

“It matters to me. They’re here because of me. I won’t have them harmed.”

“Then they won’t be harmed.” The senator closed his eye, giving an airy wave of his hand. “Jeffrey, don’t threaten her pets. They’ve got little enough time.”

“Wait.” Mandy took a step forward, bringing herself even with me. Her hand grasped at the air, and I slid mine into it, letting her cling to my fingers like the lifeline they were. “Why do you keep saying that? What do you mean, we’ve got little enough time?”

“The astronomer—” he began.

“Toni,” I interrupted. “Antonia Fabris. The one who released the signal.”

“Yes, and don’t think I haven’t considered draining her dry as thanks for that egotistical little power play.” This time, Sena tor Davis opened both eyes and sat up. “We shouldn’t have been forced to scramble for cover because a human scientist decided to release her findings. That message was never for her.”

“Then they should have made sure there was someone here to sign for it,” I said.

“They did. They sent us.” He leaned farther forward, eyes slowly sweeping across my face, and finally frowned. “Have you been eating?”

By which he meant “Have you been drinking human blood?” I didn’t credit his discretion to Mandy’s presence. No one went into politics without developing a habit of talking around the subject. “I have,” I said. I wasn’t ashamed. I still didn’t look at Mandy. I didn’t want to see the betrayal in her eyes, if there was going to be any… and I was almost more afraid to find acceptance there. I no longer knew how to feel, and so I decided to go with what had served me well in the past: anger. “Now a question for you. Didn’t you have a wife back in Washington?”

“I did, and I do.” His smile was quick, practiced, and gone almost before I could blink. “Julia understands her current role. She has been keeping our house, speaking sorrowfully to the press when necessary, and avoiding radio transmissions. She sleeps as little as possible. I promise you, she’ll be among the last to shed their human guise. She makes this sacrifice for all our sakes, to make it easier for us to move on to the next stage.”

The penny dropped. My eyes widened. “You married one of us.”

“Not an easy thing to arrange, with how widespread we were in the beginning. It took me years to find her, and years more to have her groomed into a perfect politician’s wife. Officially, she’s my childhood sweetheart: we met at summer camp, and we’re very happy together. The records are perfect, and support our story, although she’s worried about those dreadful things people are saying about me in the press.” He made an exaggerated face of concern. “To be honest, we were originally planning to reverse our positions. She would listen to the signal and connect through the forest, and I would tell people she was ailing while I continued to go about my business, undetected. Unfortunately, Agent Brown thought we needed to understand what we were going to be facing, and played that damned signal for the whole Senate before I could get out of the room. My conversion was triggered, and the plan changed. Julia can’t wait to meet you all.”

“She will soon.” The voice was Toni’s. We turned.

Toni and David were walking across the patio, Tahlia at their side. The Newfoundland plant woman looked faintly amused, like babysitting two humans was the thing she’d been hoping to spend her morning doing.

Two… I did a quick, unnecessary count. Graham and Lucas were the only ones missing. I glanced at Jeff. He didn’t seem to be smirking as much as he would have been if he had eaten my boyfriend. I switched my focus to Toni.

“What do you mean?”

She looked at me gravely. For once, there was no levity in her expression. There was no triumph, either. She looked exhausted, like she’d been checking and rechecking her own work for hours, only to come up with the same results every single time.

“The signal changed,” she said. “At approximately five o’clock this morning, local time, it grew faster, with an altered timbre and a higher data rate. I would play it for you, but listening to it directly has proven painful, as it accelerates the rate of change.”

“What are you saying? Are you saying they’re coming faster?”

“No,” said the senator. “Miss Fabris is saying they’re already here.”

3.

I don’t remember deciding to run. I just remember yanking on Mandy’s hand and spinning on my heel to race toward the house, where Graham and Lucas were waiting. Where they had to be waiting.

If the armada was here, everything was about to change. Part of me wanted to rejoice in the knowledge that the invasion was finally about to begin: after thirty years of living on this mudball that never wanted or welcomed me, I was going to have the opportunity to go home, to go someplace where the things that made me a lousy human might make me a wonderful alien. My exile, whatever I had or hadn’t done to earn it, was coming to an end.

The greater part of me wanted to get my friends—the human people, few as they were, I actually cared about—as far away from here as possible, because once the armada truly darkened Earth’s skies, whatever fragile truce had kept them safe thus far was going to be over. Earth had billions of humans. Billions. They were about to become Big Macs for the invasion, endlessly devourable and disposable.

To her credit, Mandy didn’t ask why we were running. She just pulled up alongside me and asked, “What about Toni and David?”

“Toni’s the only one who’s here because she wants to be, not because she was trying to save someone,” I replied. “They can take care of themselves.”

A shadow crossed Mandy’s eyes, but she nodded and kept running. This was about to be a war. No matter what side we were on, sacrifices were going to have to be made.

The house was almost shockingly cool after the patio. I dropped Mandy’s hand as I charged across the living room. The door to the room I shared with Graham was still ajar; he wasn’t there. That left Lucas’s room at the end of the hall, which we had all been avoiding out of courtesy since our time in Arizona had begun. He’d made no bones about how unhappy he was to be there, surrounded by aliens, or how much he resented needing to pay for his safety with blood. If it hadn’t been for the discreet bars on all the windows, he would probably have made a break for it long since, and been punished accordingly.

Lucas and Graham were sitting on the bed when I shoved the door open. They turned, eyes wide, to behold the spectacle of me and Mandy filling the doorway, winded and frantic.

“Now,” I gasped, between great gulps of air. “We go now. ”

Graham, to his credit, didn’t argue. He just stood, crossing quickly to join us.

Lucas was more difficult. “Go?” he asked, not rising. “Go where? I’m done following you, Stasia. I think I’ve already done enough.”

“We’re getting out of here, you ass,” snapped Mandy. She stepped forward, grabbing Lucas by the wrist and hauling him to his feet. “Or did you want to wind up buried in the backyard? Because we’ll leave you if that’s what you want.”

Lucas paled. “Don’t leave me.”

“Great. Come on.”

Graham’s hand clutched in mine, I turned and ran back down the hall. The house seemed suddenly too big, filled with an echoing silence that would have been terrifying if there hadn’t been so many more concrete things to be afraid of. Where were the others? Where were the aliens who shared this house with us, where were the human collaborators willing to throw their own species under the bus for the sake of being proven right among the ashes? It couldn’t be this easy.

It was. The door was unlocked; the car keys were hanging on their hooks next to the mail slots. I grabbed the keys to the van they’d used to bring me here from the NASA stronghold. I wasn’t clear on who owned it—I wasn’t clear on who owned anything around here, except that a rental agency owned the house, and the bills were in the senator’s name—but whoever it was could use one of the other three cars parked on the property. I was getting my people out.

No one stopped us as we made for the van. I tossed the keys to Graham, who slid into the driver’s seat and turned the engine on, relaxing slightly. “We have a full tank,” he reported, turning to me…

… and going still. Slowly, the color drained from his face, leaving him paler than I’d seen him since the time we’d both contracted food poisoning from one of the local greasy spoons. We’d spent the entire weekend curled up in his bed, miserably racing one another to the bathroom, throwing up what felt like a lifetime’s worth of lunches we should never have eaten in the first place. According to Lucas, who had come over with a sack of Gatorade and Pepto-Bismol, we had both been lucky to avoid being hospitalized for dehydration if nothing else.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just reached out and touched the curve of my jaw, letting his fingers rest against the patch where my skin had dropped away, revealing the green beneath. This time, the stillness was mine, the world narrowing to the touch of his fingers and the sound of my heart thudding in my ears.

“Oh,” I whispered.

The world was watching for aliens. The world was waiting for aliens, and while there were plenty of people who thought the invasion was a hoax, there were plenty more who wanted the chance to take out one of the invaders. There had been a blip on the news about a science fiction convention getting raided by a militia who thought body paint was proof of extraterrestrial origin. No one had died, but several people had been hospitalized.

Mandy and Lucas were staring at me now, the one in sympathy, the other in shock.

“We could buy some foundation—” Mandy began.

“No.” I stepped away from the open van door. It seemed like an impossible barrier all of a sudden, something too big and terrible to ever get past. How could I have thought I could just run away? The invasion was coming, and I was a part of it. Had been a part of it for my entire life, since the day I’d fallen from the sky and taken root among the Washington trees.

I’d always been the kind of person who liked to observe the world unfolding around them, watching people without interacting, letting the circumstances and situation pull me along. It had been better to observe than to act. Well, that was going to change now. I had one great action in me, and it was time for me to take it.

“No,” I said again, and slammed the door. “Go. You’re all human. You’ll all be safe if you’re away from here.”

“We won’t,” said Graham. He leaned across the seat, reaching for me through the open window. “They’re coming. We know too much. We won’t be safe no matter where we go.”

“Then at least you’ll have a head start.” I felt a pang of guilt. This was going to leave only Toni and David to flesh out the menu. Four plant people and two humans was a very different balance than four and five.

But it wasn’t going to last for long. That was why it had to change.

“Stasia, please.”

“No.” I stepped forward, grabbing his hand and kissing it fiercely. It had been days since we’d made love, but in that moment, it felt like I could remember every time he’d ever touched my skin, every brush of his body against mine. It should have been overwhelming. Instead, it felt like coming, however briefly, home. “I love you. I love all of you, in different ways—even you, Lucas, you asshole. Get out of here.”

“What if we tell the authorities where to find you?” Lucas demanded.

“Then you tell the authorities,” I said. I shrugged. “I don’t know that I care anymore. The armada is coming. You don’t want to be here when it arrives. Now will you go ?”

“I’ll see you again,” Graham promised, pulling his hand out of mine.

I forced myself to smile. “I know,” I said, and stood there watching as he threw the truck into gear and drove away, rolling for an impossibly long time down the stretch of road between us and the curve of the nearest mountain. Then the land dipped beneath the tires, and they dropped out of sight, heading for freedom, heading for the future.

Everything seemed suddenly very real to me. The sun baking down on my skin was a furnace, and I knew it was encouraging my vegetable heart to grow and digest what little life was left in my stolen humanity. The air was virtually motionless. What little wind there was seemed entirely devoted to blowing sand against my uncovered ankles. I realized with a start that I wasn’t wearing shoes, and more, that my feet didn’t hurt. I looked down. The driveway was covered in small stones, like every other piece of smooth ground I’d seen in Arizona. Cautiously, I lifted one foot and twisted it so I could see the bottom.

The skin had sloughed fully away, replaced by a textured expanse of brown that looked almost like bark. I poked it. The feeling transmitted sluggishly, more concept than actual sensation. I closed my eyes and lowered my foot again.

Staying behind had been the right decision. Getting them out of here had been the right decision. The fact that both currently felt so very wrong didn’t matter. I’d done the right thing. I had.

Eyes still closed, I turned and walked back to the house.

As I had more than half-expected, the others were waiting for me in the living room. Toni and David were crammed uncomfortably into the loveseat, Jeff looming behind them like a warning. Tahlia was seated on the corner of the couch, while Senator Davis sat in the recliner, utterly relaxed, still smiling.

“Thank you,” he said, when I entered. “I was wondering how we’d get them to leave. I knew you wouldn’t be happy if they had to die, but they couldn’t remain here any longer. Not given the current situation.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I demanded. I had a lifetime of being snotty to people who got in my way. It was time to start putting all that practice to good use. “What is the ‘current situation’? We knew the invasion was coming.”

“As of five o’clock this afternoon, oxygen detectors have been placed in every train station and bus terminal in the United States.” Senator Davis’s usually measured tone flickered for a second, revealing the deep irritation beneath. “The measure was pushed through and funded in special session, and kept quiet until it was time to begin implementation. For our ‘safety,’ of course. Even now, they’re beginning to round up the American side of the invasion.”

“Who aren’t considered human, and hence aren’t considered citizens,” I said. “We’re never going to see them again.” Not that we had seen them in the first place, except in the good green place that we sought out in our shared dreams.

“Some of them will survive long enough to be released,” said Tahlia. “Some of them will have friends or family, as you did. They’ll be able to hide themselves. But yes, many will die for the sake of our cause.”

“We don’t have a cause, ” I said. “We have an invasion, and we didn’t volunteer. We were sent here as seeds. This doesn’t have to be our fight.”

“I don’t think there’s ever been an intelligent species which will take the murder of their offspring and the infiltration of their ranks as a peaceful act,” said the senator. “Even if we’d wanted to side with the humans—even if they weren’t so damn delicious—we wouldn’t have been allowed. Not knowing we were the mirrors of their own dead.”

Toni, who had flinched a little when the senator called her delicious, sat up straighter and added, “I can promise you that much. I was in therapy for years after my little encounter in the woods, and I remember my father grilling my therapists, trying to get them to figure out whether I’d survived a kidnapping attempt. He might have been willing to shuttle me off to the middle of nowhere as a broken adult, but as a kid? I was his. The proof that he was a real, virile man who could get a woman pregnant any time he wanted to. The thought that someone had tried to interfere with that infuriated him.”

“Thinking people do not appreciate attacks on their children. We are, by our very nature, by the faces we continue to wear even as their colors peel away, a walking, breathing attack on their children. I fully expect the first charges to be filed against one of our own within the next twenty-four hours.” The senator’s voice was back to its calmly measured smoothness.

“Charges?” I asked. “For what?”

“Murder. We are each of us a murderer, however unintentional the killing was. It’s almost elegant. As seeds and flowers, we’re unthinking, unable to tell right from wrong. We seek the largest source of available protein. We consume it. We become it. The woods may be crawling with emerald deer and malachite bears… but they’re still animals. We, on the other hand, became intelligent when we imprinted on our human prey, which means we can be considered murderers.”

I stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.” He looked at me levelly. “My wife has already been detained, and her parents never liked me. They thought of her as strange, maybe a little unwell, but their own. And then I came along and remade her in my own image, using the lever of our shared origins to convince her to join me. They’ll charge her with the death of their daughter as soon as they realize it can be done—and I expect someone is telling them it can right about now. A good, high-profile murder trial does a great deal to make a war look winnable.”

Toni leaned over, resting her head against David’s arm. “Things are about to get ugly, fast. Thanks for including us in your little ‘free the humans’ stunt, by the way. I can really feel the love.”

My mouth moved silently. None of the words I had available seemed to fit. Seeing that, Toni laughed.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I know my role in this little drama. I was the resistance and now I’m the collaborator, remember? I sold out my own kind when they refused to listen to me. So now I’m on your side, in as much as I’m on anyone’s side. When your ships get here, I’m going to be at the front of the queue to step onboard and find out everything there is to know.”

“Then you’ll switch sides again and betray us all,” said Jeff sourly.

“Yes, but you’ll know it’s coming, and until you have more humans, you can’t afford to kill me.” Toni’s smile was almost serene. “A flock of chickens is expendable. The only chicken you have is worth the world.”

David, sitting next to her and playing the spare chicken in this scenario, said nothing.

I looked around the room, at this little group of people I didn’t like and hadn’t chosen, and asked the only question left that mattered:

“How long do we have?”

“Not long,” said Tahlia. She tilted her head back, like she could somehow see the sky through the ceiling, and smiled. “Not long at all.”