Page 29 of Overgrowth

Chapter 15

Tucson, Arizona: August 7, 2031

Invasion Day

1.

“I can’t fix this.” Toni looked up from Tahlia’s shoulder, a helpless scowl on her face as she spread her empty hands. “There’s no muscle, there’s no tendon, there’s just… Fuck, it looks like broccoli, okay? It looks like someone went and shot a bunch of broccoli. I don’t know whether stitches would help or not.”

“At least the bleeding has stopped,” said Graham.

“If you can call it that,” Toni groused.

Tahlia didn’t say anything. She just kept staring at the wall, the tears in her eyes shining but never quite finding it in themselves to fall.

The bullet wound in her shoulder had wept dark, sticky sap that smelled like a mixture of maple and pine for most of the drive to the no-tell motel where we were now wedged, seven people in one room. Mandy had been the first to provide medical care, washing off the sap while she made soothing noises in a language that was neither English nor Spanish, but a sweet mixture of both, like she was talking to a small child. When she had finished, Toni had taken over, citing the fact that she was the one with experience studying our kind.

Honestly, I think Mandy had been relieved when Tahlia was no longer her problem. She had crossed immediately to where I was sitting with Graham, settling on my other side, so I was flanked by the humans who had loved me enough to come back for me, despite the situation. Despite everything.

“Will it heal?”

We all jumped at the sound of Tahlia’s voice. Toni hesitated before saying, carefully, “I think so. I don’t know your biology that well—no one does—but you can move the arm, and the bullet missed the bone. You got lucky.”

“Yes,” said Tahlia. She sounded drained, like something had pulled all the vitality from her body. “Lucky.” She stood, pushing her hair away from her face as she turned to the bed where I was seated. “He died without ever seeing the face of our homeworld. He died for nothing. He had done nothing. ”

“He was going to, though,” said Toni. For the first time, she sounded calm, rational, and sincere. She sounded like the voice of reason, and it was chilling. “All of you were, and all of you are. You’re going to kill anyone who stands in the way of your invasion.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We do know that,” Toni corrected. “I guess yeah, you could make a point about human xenophobia and bigotry, but you started by killing kids, and now you’ve got weed balls smashing into the planet and something fucking huge parked out by the moon, and we’re not stupid, okay? We may be monkeys, we may be meat, but we’re not stupid. We know what it means when somebody shows up with that much firepower. Hell, we’ve been doing it to each other since we figured out how to get from one place to another. Go next door, take your neighbor’s stuff, and as long as you say God told you to, suddenly you’re in the right. Suddenly you’re fine. So it sucks that he’s dead. He was a pretty cool guy, as alien plant invaders go. But don’t pretend he was innocent because he hadn’t started slaughtering people yet. He just hadn’t gotten to that point on his agenda.”

I thought of the way Second had invoked the Great Root—reverential, sincere, in a tone that implied everyone would know what she was talking about, because have you heard the word of our lord and savior —and suppressed a shudder, leaning closer to Graham. The warm, solid presence of him was like a balm. I had never expected to see him again. I certainly hadn’t expected to see him so soon.

“Hey,” he said, and pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “How are you doing?”

I took a moment to consider my answer before I said, “I want to rewind time by about six months, and take a lot more naps before we get to this point. I feel like everything is happening at once.”

“Someone needs to talk to your alien lords and masters about project management,” said Mandy. She punched me lightly in the arm, clearly trying to jolly me out of my funk. “Thirty years with no updates, and then a dozen deadlines in a week? Not a good way to keep up employee morale.”

I lifted my head and flashed her a wan smile. “But see, we’re not employees. We’re their kids.”

“Family businesses exist.”

Toni looked up from her attempt to repair Tahlia’s arm and scowled. “This is not a ‘family business.’ Finance is a family business. Joining your grandpa’s law firm. Letting your father buy you a planetarium. This? This is an invasion. You need to get with the linguistic program.”

“You’re siding with the invaders,” said Jeff. It was the first time he’d spoken since we had reached the motel. He turned away from the window, where only a thin sliver of parking lot was visible between the paisley-patterned curtains, and frowned at Toni. “You chose us over your own species. You chose us. So could you stop acting like we’re somehow keeping you here against your will?”

“Did I hit a nerve, Begonia?” Toni picked up the cloth she’d been using to keep the wound clean, dabbing around the edge. “You’re not keeping us against our will, except in the sense that by the time you let us go—oh, wait, you didn’t do that. Stasia did.”

I blinked. “When did I earn a name?”

“When I ran out of flowers to call you.” She dropped the cloth on the table. “Come with me. I want to try something.”

Graham looked alarmed, moving to put a hand on my knee. “Where are you taking her?”

“Uh, the bathroom, genius. We can’t leave this room, and there’s not anywhere else to go. ” Toni waved her hands, encompassing the whole of our cheap, no-questions motel room. It would probably have seemed spacious, when it was just the four humans. Now that there were seven of us, it was cramped beyond belief.

That didn’t even go into the smell. The sap from Tahlia’s wound had helped a little, keeping my nose full of green and not the meaty reality of the people to either side of me. That wasn’t going to last. It had been getting harder and harder not to think of my friends and allies as walking juice boxes when we’d been in the house, where there had been plenty of room to get away from—

“Wait,” I said abruptly. “Why can’t we go back to the house? We know the senator didn’t rent it under his own name. Having his body isn’t going to lead the people who shot him there.” Assuming there had been any survivors. The scout ship had been fairly dedicated to making sure there wouldn’t be. We might be able to go back to our temporary home free and clear, putting some space between us.

Jeff was shaking his head. “We didn’t do anything to hide our tracks, and even if the senator’s name wasn’t on the rental agreement, someone from out of town renting a big property like that, only for an alien attack to occur out back… it’s not going to be hard to put together. We can never go back.”

Which meant I was never going to see my shoes again. “Great,” I said dourly.

“Yes, it sure is, and can you come here, ” hissed Toni, making another, more emphatic gesture toward the bathroom.

“It’s okay,” I said, taking Graham’s hand off my leg as I rose. “She won’t hurt me.”

“Shows what you know,” scoffed Toni, and ducked inside.

I followed. She shut the bathroom door behind me, effectively pinning us both in the small space. That was bad, especially since she hadn’t showered yet: the sweet, almost-sugary smell of her filled my nostrils, making my back teeth ache and my stomach clench. I couldn’t put into words how much I wanted to devour her, to drain her dry and cast her empty husk aside like the useless sack of skin and bones it would become.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “From the way your pupils just dilated and your jaw is clenching, I’m going to guess you really want to eat me right now. That’s cool. Although maybe talk to your boyfriend about it. He’s the biologist, he’ll be in a better position to figure out how we keep you and the rest of the vegan army from going cannibal in the night.”

I didn’t say anything. I just glared at her.

“Ooo, hit a nerve, did I? Great, because I’m going to need you to hit something a lot bigger.” She dipped her hand into her pocket, coming up with a syringe.

I recoiled automatically. “You’re not stabbing me with that!” I said, voice shrill.

“No, I’m not,” she agreed. “You’re stabbing me. I think I know how to help Tahlia heal, and I need your help. If I try to do the blood draw myself, I’m likely to change my mind and decide that encouraging you people to think of me as a walking buffet is a bad plan. But she needs it. She lost a lot of sap. I’m concerned.”

“I thought you weren’t a biologist.”

“I’m not. Honestly, I don’t know whether you people need a biologist or a botanist at this point, and I’m sure there’s a think tank somewhere arguing about exactly that, but since they never asked me to join them, my opinion doesn’t matter much.” She shook her head. “I’m not a doctor either. What I am is someone who got institutionalized on a yearly basis until I was twenty-five, and who attempted suicide enough times that my father finally asked how much it would cost him for me to promise not to besmirch the family name that way. That’s the word he used, too. ‘Besmirch.’ Like I was talking about running off to Ohio and becoming a politician or something.” The normally jovial note that underscored her words faded. “What I am is someone who learned first aid because her friends kept dying after they decided they weren’t worthy of staying alive, and that means I know how syringes work, okay? Let’s not talk about it anymore. Let’s just get some nice human blood into this thing, so I can stop your friend from doing whatever it is plant people do when they die. Wilting or going to seed or whatever. I want to meet your leaders without the death of one of their own hanging over my head.”

“… okay,” I said softly, after a long pause. “What do I do?”

Toni’s first aid experience turned out not to have been exaggerated. Step by step, she walked me through the process of bringing one of her veins to the surface, using a shoelace as a deeply unsafe tourniquet to temporarily stop the flow of blood. I held my hand steady, thinking of kittens and sunrises and every other pleasant, non-complicated thing I could as I slipped the needle under her skin and began pulling back the plunger.

Toni watched noncommittally as the reservoir filled with bright red blood. The seal between the needle and her skin was good enough that I couldn’t smell much more than I had before, but that was going to change as soon as I was finished. I paused, swallowing.

“How do I get the needle out without you bleeding everywhere?”

“Since you didn’t tap an artery, that’s not a concern,” she said. “As to how you get the needle out without me bleeding at all … you don’t. There is going to be blood. So I guess the real question is: has thirty years of living as one of us given you more self-control than the average horror-movie vampire? Are you ready to go full Dracula, or can you continue to behave like you grew up on this planet?”

I swallowed. Saliva immediately filled my mouth anew. I swallowed again. This time, the space between my teeth and tongue stayed relatively dry; this time, I felt like I might be able to breathe. “I can behave.”

“Good. We’re going to pull the needle out now.” She picked up a cotton ball, calmly showing it to me. “Did you ever donate blood?”

“Sure. Once or twice.”

“Uh-huh. Did they ever say there was anything odd about what you’d given them? Any sort of deformity of the platelets or other strange issues that they’d go ‘well, shit’ and call you for?”

“No.” I tried to breathe through my mouth, quickly in and out, not allowing myself to smell the red, red, red sweetness starting to leak from the puncture wound. It was still sealed—oh, but she was going to make me pull it out—and I could smell it anyway.

The question was actually a compelling one. I’d never been sick enough to require serious medical intervention, but I had been a fairly liberal college student, and I’d always believed that it was my job to help people if I could. No matter how much I hated them, it was just plain common sense that someone who was sick, or miserable, or otherwise being punished for the crime of existing while made of meat and trapped on this miserable planet—

Wait. Where had that come from? Thoughts of Earth had been accompanied by many things over the years. Worry over pollution and deforestation and fracking; concern about overpopulation and global climate change; even the occasional fond reference to the “big blue marble.” I had never thought of it as a miserable planet before. And much as I disliked most people, I didn’t normally blame them for being mammals. Something was wrong.

Toni was still watching me patiently. I swallowed again.

“I gave blood. They didn’t seem to mind. They took it, and they never said I had to stop giving it. I never asked what they used it for.”

“It might be interesting to contact someone from those organizations and find out. Because you were around your own blood at least once a month—assuming plant people menstruate—and you never started eating people. There had to be something about it that kept it from triggering the ‘devour’ impulse.”

“I was around other people when they bled, too. I never wanted to eat them.”

“Didn’t you?” Quick as the blink of an eye, Toni had the needle out of her arm and the cotton ball clamped down over the pinprick hole it left behind. The smell of blood only spiked slightly, remaining bearable. “Because I’m wondering what would have happened if no one had ever taken the time to tell you people weren’t for eating.”

Dimly, I remembered a few complaints about biting the other children from my preschool years. They had always seemed like the sort of weird crap kids just do sometimes. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“And aren’t we going to have a fun time figuring it out?” Toni held up the syringe. “Let’s go treat your friend.”

“Where did you even get that?”

She shrugged. “We hit a pharmacy first thing, for various necessities. I told them I was diabetic. I had enough money in my purse to convince them my lack of a prescription wasn’t a barrier to my getting the best possible medical care. I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for the collapse of the Affordable Care Act. If it were still around, no one would have believed I could be carrying that much cash and not have at least basic medical.”

“How did you know you were going to need it?”

Toni paused in packing up her things to offer me a swift, wry smile. “We were always going to come back for you,” she said. “Even if I didn’t want us to, it was never going to play out any other way. Now come on.”

She left the bathroom, and left me staring after her.

2.

Lucas was gone. Mandy and Graham were still sitting on the bed, Jeff was by the window, David was crammed into the room’s single recliner, and Tahlia was sitting by the wooden table that was meant to serve us as both eating surface and desk, but Lucas was gone. I stopped in the bathroom door, frowning.

“Where is he?”

Jeff didn’t look away from the window. “He said he was going to the soda machine. I don’t believe that was true. He ran out of here too quickly for that.”

“And you let him?”

“What would you have had me do?” He turned to face me, expression infinitely weary. “I could have killed him. I’ve never killed a man, but it’s getting easier and easier to consider, especially since it’s clear now that they won’t hesitate before killing us. I just wasn’t sure how you’d take that, since he’s one of your friends, and you’ve already made it clear that you’d choose them over us.”

“I didn’t choose them over you,” I said. “I chose them and you. I chose to save the people I love while standing with the people I come from. Are you really going to tell me I can’t do that?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, and I don’t need to,” he said, returning his attention to the window. “One of the people you saved is probably telling his authorities about us right now, and our ships are closing in. War is coming. So I don’t have to tell you anything. Reality is going to do it for me.”

“Graham…” I turned to the bed and frowned as my boyfriend—my boyfriend, who was supposed to be on my side no matter what—refused to meet my eyes. “Where did he go?”

“This has all been a little much for him, Stasia.”

“This has been a little much for all of us.”

“You know who this has been a lot much for?” asked Toni, kneeling in front of Tahlia and reaching up to check the other woman’s pupils. “The lady who got shot. Can you pause the shouting and recriminations for one second while we take care of her?”

“Bless you,” murmured Tahlia.

“You can try,” said Toni. “Stasia, come over here and hold her head.”

“Why?” This time, when Jeff turned away from the window, it was with alarm. He took a step toward them, hands balling into fists. “What are you going to do to her?”

“Nothing that will hurt her, Captain Caveman. God, I can’t even make a plant joke when you’re being this much of an asshole. I’m either going to help her get better, or I’m going to help make however much time she has left a little more pleasant. I don’t think it matters which one, do you? No matter which way it goes, she’s going to be a happier world-eating space invader.”

I walked over while Toni was speaking, putting my hands on either side of Tahlia’s head. She relaxed into my grasp, letting the tension flow out of her neck and shoulders. With dim surprise, I realized she trusted me. She believed that if I was willing to help Toni do this, it was something that had to happen.

We trusted each other. No matter how much we might fight or disagree, we were members of the same copse, and we knew that we would either grow together or wilt apart. That, too, was relatively new. Our time in the forest and in each other’s company was changing us, rewriting us into something closer to our parent species. I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. But I had to wonder…

Was I still going to be Stasia when this was over? Or was I going to be someone new? Would I even like who I became?

Toni raised the syringe. Tahlia’s eyes locked on it, some of the tension coming back into the skin beneath my fingers. This wasn’t uneasiness or pain: this was hunger, plain and simple, overwriting everything else. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the same tension in Jeff. He looked like he was ready to lunge across the room and snatch the syringe from Toni’s hand, if that was what it took.

“Open your mouth,” said Toni gently. “Don’t bite down. I don’t want you to stick yourself on the needle.”

“Contamination concern?” asked Graham.

“Their blood really is more like sap; it thickens very quickly on contact with air,” said Toni. “If she pricks herself on the syringe, she might block it to the point where I can’t clean it, and we need to be able to reuse these needles.”

She’d been thinking ahead this whole time, I realized. Ever since she had decided to switch sides, she’d been planning for the moment when she’d have to run with us without being consumed. It would have been admirable, if it hadn’t been so damn chilling.

Tahlia opened her mouth. Toni maneuvered the tip of the syringe inside and depressed the plunger. The smell of human blood wafted through the air, only slightly filtered by the loose seal of Tahlia’s lips. I closed my eyes, swallowing a moan. Jeff wasn’t quite as successful. The sound of his yearning echoed through the room. When I opened my eyes again, Mandy was pressed against the wall with Graham in front of her, shielding her, while David was frozen in his seat, looking like he wanted to fade into the wallpaper.

Only Toni looked unbothered… but then, Toni had encountered one of the special flowers when she was a child, had been changed and defined by it as much as any of us had. Maybe we no longer had the power to frighten her. Maybe that, too, was the way things needed to be.

The door banged open. Everyone jumped, even Toni, although she had the foresight to pull the empty syringe away from Tahlia as she did, meaning no one actually got stabbed. Lucas, standing in the doorway with a paper bag in his hand, scowled at us all.

“What?” he demanded.

“We thought you ran,” said Jeff bluntly.

“I thought about it,” said Lucas. “But even if I did, there’s no way I could get those assholes”—he nodded toward Mandy and Graham—“to come, so what’s the point? I’d just get swept up by the government and interrogated until I pissed myself. May as well stay here and try to keep my friends alive.”

“So where did you go?” asked Jeff.

“7–Eleven.” Lucas held up his bag. “I have sodas, I have sugary snacks, and I have information, if you’d like to let me shut the door and share with the other children.”

“We would appreciate that very much,” said Tahlia. Her voice sounded steadier than it had since she’d been shot. I glanced down at her. The color was coming back to her cheeks, and she was holding her head up without my help. More surprisingly, the hole in her shoulder appeared to be shrinking. No: not just appeared to be. As I watched, a root no thicker than a hair flung itself across the void in her skin, beginning to put out more roots, patching the damage. I glanced at Toni.

She was smirking, looking satisfied with herself. “Blood is everything to you people,” she said. “It would have to be, or you’d have figured out a better way than sailing across the stars to get it. Hungry, hungry alien invaders, and we’re a whole world of ration packs. It only stands to reason that you’d do better with it than without it.”

“My God,” breathed David. “They’re going to be unstoppable.”

Toni rolled her eyes. “And as far as anyone’s concerned, we’ve chosen their side over our own species. So calm down, shut up, and listen. Lucas?”

“Eight people went into the desert to find out what that shooting star was,” said Lucas, stepping into the room and closing the door behind himself. “Only one of them made it out. The sheriff’s nephew. He was raving about squid from space, and how they’d ripped everyone apart.”

“Not squid, but I can sort of see where you’d make that mistake,” I said. “Vines can look a lot like tentacles.”

Lucas shuddered and continued, stone-faced, “This wasn’t the only falling star. They’ve been coming down all over the country, and wherever they land, people have been dying.”

“The people in the desert brought guns when they came to investigate an astrological phenomenon,” I said hotly. “They were the ones looking for a fight, not us. They shot the senator. We didn’t have any weapons. We didn’t do anything to them. They were happy to kill us anyway.”

“And your scout was happy to kill them,” said Toni. “When you’re the invading army, you don’t really get to claim the moral high ground when you have weapons carrying themselves into the territory you’re hoping to occupy. I get that you’re siding with the people who didn’t strike first, but you’re also siding with the people who slid themselves into someone else’s backyard with a big ‘try me’ written across their faces.”

“How many dead?” asked Tahlia.

“No one’s sure,” said Lucas. “If you listen to the man at the convenience store, hundreds. The entire Midwest in flames. If you listen to the talking heads on the news, there have been no confirmed deaths as yet, and the president is already dispatching troops to the landing sites to keep order. If you listen to the internet, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Turn off your phones if you’ve got them, by the way. Once the Army gets involved, the words ‘martial law’ are likely to be next, and then the NSA is looking for anything out of place, like the cellphones of a bunch of Washington residents pulling data in Arizona.”

“NASA never gave my phone back,” I said.

“My phone has been undetectable for years,” said Toni. We all looked at her. She shrugged. “Paranoia is only a disadvantage before the alien invasion. Now it’s the reason I’m going to outlive half my species.”

“We’re getting away from the point,” I said. “If what Lucas says is true, we need to get out of here. It’s only a matter of time before someone finds the senator’s body, if they haven’t found it already, and starts checking local hotels for people who don’t belong there.”

“Then we’re fucked,” said Lucas. “There’s no way someone doesn’t know what our van looks like by now. We take it out on the road and we’re finished.”

“Not necessarily,” said Mandy. “You got any money left?”

Lucas grimaced.

3.

David had gone with Mandy and Lucas to the nearest all-night drugstore, leaving the rest of us to mill around the motel room and wait for them to return. Tahlia and Jeff were in the corner with Toni, speaking in low tones and occasionally gesturing toward the window. The divide of their species seemed to have been forgotten in the face of the larger problem of how we were all going to get out of here in one piece. This wasn’t privacy—privacy might be something we never had again—but Graham and I were still taking advantage of the pause, curled face-to-face on the bed, his hand cupping my cheek, our foreheads barely touching.

“Hey,” he whispered, his voice barely a breath. I felt it as much as I heard it, and it made me shiver with comfort and with longing. Longing for a simpler time, when I’d been a girl who might or might not be out of her mind, and not the fugitive agent of an invading alien empire.

“Hey,” I whispered back. “How are you holding up?”

Graham laughed. It was a tight, unsteady sound, and hearing it broke my heart a little. That was almost reassuring. I was having thoughts that didn’t feel like my own, and it was getting harder and harder to think of the Earth as my home or the human race as worth saving, but I could still hurt when the people I loved were confused or in pain. I was still human enough to care.

Was caring really a human attribute, though? Second had been delighted to have a sister. The Swift had been harder for me to read, but he had seemed pleased by Jeff’s presence, and proud to have a brother who was conquering this bright new garden. They had to care about each other, at least a little, and if they cared about each other, they would learn to care about us. They would.

“I don’t know anymore,” said Graham, snapping me back into the moment. “I feel… I feel like I’m releasing an invasive species into the Everglades. You know?”

“I do,” I said quietly.

As a herpetologist, Graham had been cleaning out invasive species—things that shouldn’t be there, snakes whose owners had allowed them to escape down drains, spiders and frogs and mosquitos that had hitched rides on cargo ships and been brought over by wildlife smugglers—for most of his career. He would call me from the Everglades with a sack full of pythons in his hand and a grin on his face, like he’d just improved the world through the simple act of putting a bunch of snakes back where they belonged. Things that interfered with the proper functionality of an ecosystem offended him on a deep, integral level.

I put my hand on his arm, letting my fingers draw a delicate pattern there, tracing the veins and hoping he wouldn’t realize that was what I was doing. “I’ve been here for a long time, though. A whole bunch of us have. We’re not invasive. This is where we’re from. Right here.”

“Stasia, you realize you’re the vanguard of an invasion. ‘Invasive’ is in the name.” He looked at me, clearly troubled. “Can you not see that? That you’re not supposed to be here?”

I pushed away from him, startled. For a moment, I just stared. The words to express my shock and dismay refused to come, locked somewhere behind my tongue, filling my throat with bile. Finally, I forced myself to swallow and asked, “Do you really think that? That I’m not supposed to be here?”

“Stasia—”

“Because I wouldn’t exist if I weren’t here. Not this version of me. I don’t know who the original Anastasia would have grown up to be, and I’m sorry she had to die, but you know I’m here because she died. Because a seed fell from space and swallowed her when she was only three years old. Ate her up like a monster out of a fairy tale. I did that. Me. I fell from space, and I ate a little girl, and I took her life, and I grew up to be a woman who loves you. Do you not want me to love you?”

My voice had been rising steadily as I spoke. On the last word, I pushed myself away and sat up, glaring at him fiercely.

Graham rolled more slowly into a sitting position, his hands raised defensively, like he was afraid he needed to ward me off. “That’s not what I said.”

Everyone was watching us. They weren’t saying anything, and somehow that just infuriated me more. “You just said I don’t belong here.”

“Because you don’t! Because…” Graham paused, taking a deep breath, before he said, “Because I love you. I love you so much it’s stupid. I was planning to spend the rest of my life with you when I thought you were human, and I’m still planning to spend the rest of my life with you now. I didn’t stop loving you when your skin started falling off, or when you started drinking blood, so it would be a little weird for me to stop now. But if you’d never come here, I would never have loved you. You can see that, can’t you? Maybe I would have met Anastasia and maybe I wouldn’t have, maybe I would have fallen in love with someone else or maybe I would have been alone forever, wondering who the hell I thought I was waiting for, but it wouldn’t have been you. And if it hadn’t been you, there’s no way I would have been sitting here, ready to support an alien invasion of my home planet. I would have been…” He stopped.

“You would have been on the right side,” I finished dully, climbing off the bed. “You would have been one of the scientists working to figure out how to kill us all before we could hurt your world.”

“Can you blame me?” he asked. “This is my home planet.”

“It’s my home planet too.” I shook my head. “You can still leave, you know. You can go and… and find the think tank that’s figuring out how to defeat us. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to see you. You have so much to share with them.”

“That’s the problem !” he shouted.

The room froze. If I had thought that it was quiet before, that was nothing compared to the silence that fell in the wake of his cry. I stared at him. He stared back, chest heaving, cheeks flushed.

“I can’t go find the scientists, and I can’t tell them how to defeat you, because God, Stasia, I don’t want to help you destroy the planet, but I’m not going to betray you. There has to be a better way. There has to be a way we can convince your people not to do this. To leave us alone, or better yet, to be our friends.” He raked a hand through his hair, leaving it in disarray as he stared at me pleadingly. “We’re not alone in the universe anymore. You’re out there. Your people are out there. And you… you’re one of the most amazing women I’ve ever known. I love you. There has to be a way we can work together. Imagine what we could do if we worked together.”

I was still staring at him, trying to formulate an answer, when the door slammed open, spilling Mandy, Lucas, and David back into the room. I had a split second to register the smell of smoke and the sound of sirens before a much more urgent scent washed all of that away.

Blood.

Lucas was bleeding from a cut on his forehead. It looked like it had been made with a rock, splitting the skin from his eyebrow all the way back to his hairline. The wound wasn’t deep and it wasn’t serious enough to require medical care, but it was bleeding copiously, red sheeting down the side of his face and dripping onto the floor as he half-walked, half-staggered into the room, leaning heavily on David all the way.

There was a high, keening sound. I realized it was me. I swallowed hard, but it didn’t stop, just picked up from Tahlia and Jeff. All three of us were staring at the blood like it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen.

Toni shoved herself away from the wall, hurriedly moving to loop her arm around Lucas and drag him toward the bathroom. “You explain, I’m going to stop the bleeding before shit gets ugly,” she said, and they were gone, the door slamming behind them.

The tension in the room snapped like a hypnotist’s fingers, and we were free to move. I staggered backward, pressing a hand to the hollow of my throat, and Graham was there to catch me and hold me up. I wanted to thank him. I wanted to shove him away and tell him that he didn’t get to touch me anymore, not if he thought I had no business being here. I did neither. I just swallowed again, trying to steady myself enough to speak.

I wasn’t fast enough. “What happened?” demanded Jeff.

“There’s a riot,” said Mandy. “Which sort of makes sense, because the east side of town is on fire. The scout ship is moving.”

“Moving where ?” asked Graham.

“Couldn’t tell you, wasn’t going to go and ask it,” snapped Mandy. “A giant alien death machine wants to stomp through a city, I am getting the fuck out of its way. So people are running and people are screaming and people are being assholes, because that’s what scared people do.”

“Someone threw a brick at us,” said David. “They would have done worse, but Mandy screamed that she saw the scout ship coming, and they turned and ran.”

“We still have the money, and we have the makeup,” said Mandy, holding up an overloaded plastic bag. “What’s a little looting during a full-scale riot?”

The air was clearing, and it was getting easier to breathe. I managed a shaky laugh. “Good to know where your morality bends,” I said. “How long do you think we have before the riot reaches us?”

“Not long,” said David. “If we’re going to turn you back into humans, we need to get started.”

“What about our eyes?” asked Tahlia. “Sclera aren’t customarily green.”

“Sunglasses,” said Mandy. “Not enough people know what the aliens really look like to be suspicious of sunglasses. Yet. We don’t have a lot of time. Stasia, I know you know your way around a makeup sponge. Get over here.”

I got over there, glancing back at Graham as I went. He met my eyes and nodded grimly. He knew as well as I did that this wasn’t over.

Sometimes it felt like it was never going to be.