Page 3 of Overgrowth

Chapter 2

Seattle, Washington: July 13, 2031

Twenty-five days pre-invasion

1.

Lucas was waiting at the park and ride. That was nice. I can drive, but I don’t own a car, and taking the bus home takes forever and isn’t much fun. All my complaints about riding the bus to work are tripled when I have to ride the bus home, with a heaping side order of feeling like a terrible person due to not wanting to be around strangers. I’m not misanthropic. I just don’t like people. They’re not quite the same thing.

Similar. But not the same.

It was the misanthropy that made me stop, nearly stumbling, when I got closer to the car and realized the front passenger seat was occupied by a tall woman in a Rat City Roller Derby T-shirt, her head crowned by a mass of corkscrew curls dyed in all the shades of sunset. She was as indie-looking as Lucas was corporate, and the main reason I hadn’t noticed her sooner was that she was halfway into his seat, the fingers of one hand threaded through his hair, the fingers of the other hand wrapped tightly around his tie.

Roxanna. Oh, joy.

It’s not that I don’t like Roxanna. On paper, we should be the best of friends. She’s quirky at best, eccentric at worst, with a passion for reptiles that I honestly respect, even if I don’t understand it. She works at the university, helping them keep their bio department from bursting out of confinement and eating everyone, which I assume is what poorly tended bio depart ments do. She’s been dating Lucas for almost five years. Mandy and I both expect to be evicted one day so he can give our rooms to her lizards.

As long as it makes Lucas happy, we’ll go. We won’t be happy about it, and we’ll complain constantly, but we’ll go.

Roxanna let go of Lucas’s tie when I opened the door and climbed into the back. She twisted in her seat to give me a serpentine smile, keeping her fingers threaded through his hair. I was used to that. She worries Mandy or I might make a play for him one day, using our proximity to establish a sort of, I don’t know, home-team advantage. The fact that Mandy doesn’t think of Lucas that way and I’ve been in a relationship for years doesn’t seem to strike her as a factor.

“Hi, Ana,” she said brightly. “Isn’t it nice how we were able to come and get you?”

Subtext: be grateful, because she could have convinced Lucas not to pick me up, even though our schedule for the week had been arranged since the first of the month. Roxanna thinks schedules and plans are things that happen to other people. Mandy calls her “the wrecking ball” when Lucas isn’t around, and she’s not wrong. Roxanna never met a social construct she didn’t feel the need to challenge, if only to show that she considers herself above such petty ideas.

Sometimes I want to drop six of Roxanna’s own lizards down the back of her shirt and watch her dance around the house until she figures out what she’s done to piss me off.

Lucas looked abashed, although that may have been as much over the fact that he doesn’t like PDAs as anything else. “How was work, Stasia?” he asked.

“Same old, same old,” I said. “I think I’m going to clean out my desk.”

“Oh, no,” said Roxanna, all mock concern. “Are you getting fired?” She lowered her voice on the last word, almost whispering, like it was some sort of delicious secret.

Lizards. In her pants. “No,” I said, focusing on buckling my seatbelt, not allowing myself to look at her. If I didn’t look at her, I could pretend she was one of my phone customers, too distant to be worth getting mad at. “My coworkers keep messing with my stuff. I’ve talked to my supervisor, but I can’t prove exactly who’s doing it, and I don’t want to go to HR, because they’ll like me even less if I get the whole team in trouble. So I may bring my things home, to make it easier.”

I could keep the picture of Seymour taped to the edge of my monitor. No one ever messed with that, maybe because they understood that defacing family photos, even pictures of pets, would make HR intervention inevitable. Besides, they’d just find a new way to torment me if I took everything home. I knew that. But I wouldn’t worry about my toys disappearing anymore, and I wouldn’t start every morning in my cube feeling like I’d been violated.

Roxanna made a noise that I would have read as sympathy in anyone else. From her, it sounded like a trap. I tensed, waiting for it to snap shut.

I didn’t have to wait for long. “You know, I can sort of sympathize with your coworkers,” she said, earning a sharp look from Lucas as he pulled out of the parking lot. She gave him a soothing pat on the arm. “Sorry, Luke, but you know she’s weird. You know you’re weird, Ana.”

“I do know I’m weird,” I allowed. I didn’t bother correcting her on my name. It wouldn’t do me any good.

“Maybe if you stopped introducing yourself to people as a space invader, they’d be, I don’t know. Nicer to you. Or less inclined to mess with you for fun. You could make this stop.”

“You realize she’d have to change jobs,” said Lucas. His voice was flat. They were going to have a fight tonight, I realized, and while he might never say explicitly that it was about the way she’d spoken to me on the ride home, that would be the cause.

Roxanna knew it, too. She twisted again, shooting me a quick, sharp glare—as if I’d been the one to start this—and said, “That doesn’t make sense. She likes her job.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lucas. “She likes her job. She doesn’t like her coworkers, because they don’t like her. They don’t like her because…?”

“Because she won’t stop saying that weird alien crap,” said Roxanna. Then she paused, sitting up straighter. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said loudly, in case they’d forgotten I was in the car. “Oh.”

Not telling people seems like a logical idea. That’s what people have been suggesting since I hit third grade and having what my teachers always termed a “rich fantasy life” went from being a good thing to being a sign that something was seriously wrong with me. Who cares if I think I’m an alien plant person? That part’s fine. Everyone has their little delusions. The trouble is the way I keep saying it out loud.

It’s funny how everyone who suggests that sort of silence seems to think they’re the first ones. Like everyone else I’ve ever known has thought, hey, who cares if she runs around telling people she’s not from this planet, at least she knows how to floss. I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut a thousand times, and I tried it for maybe the first hundred, biting my lips and smiling blankly until I wanted to scream.

It never ends well. Every time, I slip, or I run into someone who knew me before the latest attempt at silence, or I finally decide I can trust my new friends with something more than the glossiest, most marketable version of myself. Belief in my own alien nature aside, I’ve never been able to stick to a story for long, and eventually it just seems easier to tell the truth as I know it. And you know what?

It’s worse. Every single time, it’s worse.

When I tell people right out the gate, they can decide that I’m quirky or decide that I’m deluded, and either way, they build their mental models of me with that particular trait in place. When I don’t tell them…

When I don’t tell them, I’m messing with them. Or I’m not just deluded, I’m dangerously disconnected from reality, since apparently I know I’m not normal and I chose to hide it for as long as I could. Or they laugh at me. That’s almost the worst. People who find out I’m an alien as soon as they meet me, even though I can’t prove it and I look human and I’ve been on this planet for more than thirty years, which seems like a long time for an advance scout, they sometimes laugh. But it’s a short laughter, a disbelieving laughter, the kind of laughter that’s waiting for a punchline. The people who find out later laugh like I am the punchline, like there’s no point in pretending I’m ever going to be anything else.

I wasn’t dismissing Roxanna’s idea because it came from her, or because I didn’t like her and knew she didn’t particularly like me. I was dismissing it because it had come from my mother, from my therapist, from my favorite English teacher, and from myself. Because it had come from virtually every person I’d ever trusted, and if it hadn’t worked when it was born from a place of love and compassion and genuine concern, it certainly wasn’t going to work when it came from a place of “you’re weird, stop being weird.”

The strangest thing about Roxanna was how such an enormous weirdo could survive being continually judgmental and abrasive, yet not see how these two sides of her personality were in conflict. Lucas and Roxanna would never have met if not for the overlap in their respective weirdnesses luring them both to Burning Man, where love on the playa had blossomed into love in my living room three nights a week. But she sure did feel like she was entitled to judge Mandy and me.

Lucas pulled into the driveway. I waited exactly long enough for the engine to turn off, and then I was out of the car, leaving the two of them in my dust. I heard Roxanna shout something. I didn’t slow down enough to find out what it was. I wanted my bedroom, safe and secure and full of things that belonged to me, and more, I wanted my door, solidly closed between me and the rest of the world. I was done with people. I was so, so done with people.

Seymour raised his head when I barreled into the room, and seeing it was me, stood and flowed down the bed like water to chirp and purr in my direction. Cats are better than people. Cats are always better than people.

“I bet if cats were the dominant life form on this planet, we wouldn’t be getting ready to invade,” I said dully, stroking his head. Seymour narrowed his eyes and purred louder. There was a truth I didn’t fully understand and didn’t want to think about too hard buried in my words, tucked into the corners and contradictions. I flung myself onto the bed, pressing my face into the pillow, and tried to relax as Seymour settled against my side, a warm, comforting weight.

Here is the truth: there are times when I’ve wondered whether I was, in fact, insane. Whether there might be a pill out there strong enough to make me human, to realign my divergent neurochemistry onto something more ordinary. There’s nothing wrong with seeking help when it’s needed. It’s just that most of the time, I haven’t felt like it was needed.

Yes, insisting I’m an alien has complicated my life. Yes, introducing myself with “and my people are on their way across the gulf of stars to devour and subjugate the human race, but mostly devour” as part of my family background has consistently made things harder for me. Yes, I understand I can’t prove any of the things I say. I don’t know how I know them. I only know that they’re true.

But I can hold a job. I can make friends. I know the people who care about me are good, compassionate, and understanding—and they know that once they’ve accepted my alien nature, I’ll always be cool about whatever it is they need me to accept about them. It’s give and take, after all. It matters.

Seymour moved from my side up to the pillow. Face pressed against his side, I took a few deep, slow breaths, and fell asleep.

2.

“Stasia?” My name was accompanied by the sound of fingers drumming on my door, like the staccato step of a spider wearing tap shoes. “You awake in there?”

“Mmm?” There was cat hair in my mouth. I spat it out as I rolled over and squinted at the clock. Almost eight. Either my after-work nap had run long, or I was about to be late for work the next—

No. Saturday. If it was morning, it was Saturday. Which meant it wasn’t morning, since nothing short of a major cosplay competition gets Mandy out of bed before noon on the weekend.

“That didn’t sound like a yes, but it didn’t sound like a no, either. Can I come in?”

“Depends.” I sat up, rubbing at my face with one hand. The checklist of my dreams was still swimming in the back of my mind—trees, screaming, the flower with the dragonfly-wing petals. They had been vibrating this time, tapping together like some kind of vegetable Morse code, almost comprehensible, if I could just hold on and force myself to listen…

The images were already fading. Whatever they’d had to tell me was going to need to wait until bedtime.

“Depends on what?”

“On whether Roxanna is with you.”

Mandy scoffed before she opened the door and stepped into my room, slipping through as lithely as Seymour weaving his way along the fireplace mantle. Not the worst comparison. Like my cat, she was small, quick, and disinclined to listen when people told her not to do something she wanted to do. Unlike my cat, she had some vague understanding of boundaries— enough, at least, to knock when there was a chance I wouldn’t have clothes on.

Her own clothes were more characteristic of “normal Mandy” than her work clothes: a fluffy pin-up girl skirt over an actual petticoat, covered in horror-movie-style Venus flytraps, some with severed human limbs in their mouths. I blinked. She beamed.

“Lucas told me what Roxanna had said, right before he took her out for dinner,” she said. “I figured this would be a good dress to have on when she got back.” Her smile was a knife, prepared to wound, refusing to be slid back into its sheath.

A warm wave of affection swept over me. I did not rush across the room to hug Mandy, but I thought about it very loudly. “You are the best.”

“I know.” She preened, fluffing her skirt before patting the perfect waves of her hair. “Just keep reminding yourself that she has many excellent qualities, even if we can’t see them, because if she didn’t, we would have to kill her, and that would make Lucas sad.”

“He’d get over it.”

“Yes, but he might also get new housemates, and I don’t want to move this close to Comic-Con.” Mandy brightened. “Do you want to come help me finish one of my costumes? I have a lot of rhinestones to attach.”

“Is this a sincere request, or a ‘Hey, Stasia, let me distract you for a while’ request?”

Mandy shrugged. “A bit of both. I don’t need the help, exactly—I planned my time much better this year than I did last year—but it would make things go faster, and you’d feel like you’d accomplished something.”

“As opposed to…?”

“As opposed to sitting in here sulking until you’re sure everyone else is asleep. Come on. Bedazzle things with me.” Mandy’s smile was less pointed this time, but no less laser-focused. “I refuse to let Roxanna spoil your weekend.”

At last, I understood. “She asked you when you’re going to get a boyfriend again, didn’t she?”

Mandy’s grim nod was all the answer I needed.

People who don’t understand our dynamic tend to look at our housing situation—two unmarried women and one unmarried man—and assume either we’re all having sex with each other, or one day Lucas will push his luck with one of us and we’ll wind up on the news for murdering him. People are kind of awful that way. Roxanna is a special kind of awful, because she looks at our situation and, without wanting to move in and give up her perfectly curated lizard habitat, just assumes that whenever one of us is single, we’re about to be making a play for Lucas.

Mandy wasn’t single when she moved in. Mandy was happily involved with a mountain of a man named Robert, who walked through the world with the exaggerated gentleness of someone who had become very large very young, and knew on a bone-deep level that everyone around him was breakable. He rode a motorcycle and regularly showed up at the house dressed in black leather, looking like something out of a Mad Max film. He also had two ginger cats he loved more than life itself, and did cosplay with Mandy at conventions, and she had just raised the question of whether he could move in with her to Lucas when his sister had called to tell us that Robert had been in an accident. A semi had lost control on the bridge. There had been nowhere for him to go.

According to the hospital, he hadn’t suffered. That was probably supposed to make us feel better. It did, for me, a little. I don’t think it helped Mandy at all. Only time was going to do that. Unfortunately, it had happened long enough ago that Roxanna seemed to think the statute of limitations on mourning had expired, and now every other visit, she was offering to introduce Mandy to someone—anyone—who wasn’t Lucas.

Mandy looked at me and sighed.

“You’re cute,” said Mandy. “You need to learn how to brush your hair more than twice a week, and I would kill to take you shopping for some better clothes, but you’re cute. Why doesn’t she ask you about your love life, and leave me the hell alone?”

“She thinks I’m crazy,” I said, and grimaced. “You know, I don’t mind when you call me crazy, because you’re sort of… stating a fact, not using it as a reason I’m not good enough to do something I want to do. Roxanna uses it like a brick to hit me with.”

“I call you crazy because you think you’re allowed to eat my cinnamon toast,” said Mandy easily. “You’re not crazy. Your people will be here any day, and they’re going to eat us all. I only ask that you let me watch when they chow down on Roxanna.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, through a smile, and followed her down the hall toward the stairs that would take us to the basement craft room.

Nobody improves an evening like Mandy.

Nobody expects me to be happy about hot-gluing eight hundred sequins to a mantis-shrimp ball gown like Mandy, either. She busied herself with stitching on the larger pieces, occasionally pausing to hand me another packet of small, shimmering “scales” and point to the patch of fabric that didn’t look enough like an explosion at the bling factory. She didn’t talk much, and neither did I. We were both content to be doing something and, better, to be doing it together.

Lucas had been Mandy’s friend first. They met in college, where they were both in the same anime society. Weird costumes and flashy cartoons are their points of commonality, and have always been enough to bond them into a tightly functional unit. Before Roxanna, he would have been down here with us, gluing sequins and probably throwing chunks of sculpting foam at Mandy’s head. I had come later, when the three of us had started frequenting the same comic book shop.

Three nerds in a house. Two human, one alien plant invader. One “oh, she’s kidding about the plant thing,” one “it’s not hurting anyone either way,” and me, who sometimes couldn’t make up my own mind about whether I was kidding, or whether I was supposed to be doing something to get the world ready for the invasion.

Mandy tossed me another packet of sequins. Right: I was supposed to be doing something. I was supposed to be gluing these down.

I got back to work.

3.

By the time we stopped for bed, I was properly exhausted. Better yet, Lucas and Roxanna were already in bed, having returned from dinner and retreated into his bedroom without bothering to say good night to us. That was fine by me. I brushed my teeth, collected my cat, and slipped into my own room, Seymour purring in my arms.

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. That should have been a sign that things were about to get ugly. Most nights, sleep comes slowly for me, assuming sleep comes at all.

Instead, I closed my eyes on my dark bedroom and opened them on a forest that I had seen hundreds of times since I was three. Not the forest behind my grandparents’ house, comfortable and coniferous and still growing not that far from the house. Mandy and I could drive there in a few hours. This forest…

This was a forest made for dreams, or nightmares. Made for a world where the balance of oxygen in the air was different, where things felt less constrained to growing low and close to their own roots. Trees towered around me like California redwoods, some with trunks larger than an office building. Their bark was purple mottled with streaks of red and yellow, and it had a vital quality to it that the trees I knew when I was awake lacked. I pressed my hand against a trunk, the bark rough against my palm, and felt the heartbeat echoing through the tree, a thick, heavy pulse that shook my teeth in their sockets.

When I pulled my hand away, I left a layer of skin behind. This was a dream: there was no pain, only a calm satisfaction at the idea that I was finally to be divested of my human guise.

Evolution has tried on so many gowns, casting them aside the moment they become less effective than something else in her closet. It would be foolish arrogance to assume every world would follow the Star Trek mode and settle on something with two legs, two arms, eyes to watch the world, hands to reach out and change it. The octopus, the crow, they’re both Earth creatures, and they don’t look much like humans. Why would alien plant people?

Whatever I had been before my fall to Earth left me in the body of Anastasia Miller, it wasn’t what I would have been if I’d fallen anywhere else, or what I would have been if I had stayed at home. If I had a home. This forest… it felt like home, the way my dream forests always did, but it didn’t feel like a place I could visit. As always, I looked up, trying to see the sky, and found nothing but more trees, stretching upward and upward, reaching toward forever.

Vines circled the trunks and draped themselves over the branches, festooning them in festival array. Their flowers were the purple-black of bruises, blooming wide to show their bloody pink centers. I didn’t know what kind of pollinators might come to those flowers, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Higher up, about where Earth trees would have been forming a crown, the branches grew thicker and denser, creating a platform on which smaller trees—these black-trunked and yellow-leafed—took root. It was a beautiful symbiosis, and it continued everywhere I looked.

The air was like honey. I took a deep breath, letting it fill my dream-lungs, and began to walk.

Over the years, the various therapists who’ve tried to help with my “I think I’m from another planet” problem have remarked that it’s amazing how my dream-forest remains the same. It doesn’t. It’s just that I’ve never been able to articulate the ways it changes. Over the years, I’ve seen one of the vast foundation trees fall, seen it covered in knee-high flowers that smelled like rotting meat, which broke it down into mulch before withering away, their purpose in this strange ecosystem served. I’ve seen smaller trees grow, faster than terrestrial trees but still slowly, swelling upward over the course of years.

If this landscape never changed, I would have had an easier time writing it off as some strange fiction, a way for my mind to code the trauma that changed me from ordinary girl to alien. Instead, it grew with me, following its own rhythms and patterns, over which I had little influence.

I kept walking, touching the occasional trunk, until the ground began to dip under my feet, leading me to a shallow bowl. There, concealed by the trees and roots around them, I found a garden’s worth of flowers with dragonfly wings for petals and nests of vines at the base of their stems, taking the place of leaves. The petals vibrated at my approach, almost as if the flowers were saying hello.

Of course they were saying hello.

I stepped carefully over vines as I made my way to the center of the garden, and the vines responded by twitching out of the way, clearing a path. When I reached the center, I sat down, checking to be sure I wasn’t going to crush any seedlings before I stretched out and let the vines slither over me.

They closed around my body in a dense cocoon, squeezing until the weight of them blocked out everything but the honeyed scent of the air and the light slanting through the branches. I had never been able to catch so much as a glimpse of the sun, but I had never seen this place in darkness, either.

// here // whispered the flowers around me.

“Here,” I replied sleepily. They hadn’t always spoken English, these alien plants in this alien place, like I hadn’t always spoken English. We had known another language once, the plants and I, but it had faded from my mind the longer I spent in Stasia’s skin, until English was all I had left to use. “Home.”

// here, home // agreed the flowers. Then, in a softer tone, if flowers can be said to have a tone, they said, // soon. //

“Soon?” I asked.

// soon. close. ready? // Their last word had an echo to it, the sound of a dozen different languages layered on top of one another. I had heard that echo before, a reassuring implication that I wasn’t alone in this forest when I slept—and more, that I was not alone in my alien condition when I woke. I had never been able to find another person who shared my convictions about the upcoming invasion. I’d met other “aliens,” sure, but none of them had the same framework of beliefs and details that I did.

Maybe it’s silly, but when I heard the voices whisper through the forest of flowers, it was easy to think each of them might belong to another scout, working alone and without clear instructions in hostile, alien terrain.

That’s the thing about being from outer space. I’m an alien to the people around me. It’s easy to forget that this also makes them alien to me.

// ready? // asked the flowers again, more urgently this time.

“Yes,” I said, and closed my eyes.

The air thrummed with the affirmative, answers coming from all parts of the forest. The scent of honey was thick and heavy in the air, so sweet it was like breathing candy. I relaxed further, slipping toward sleep while I was already dreaming. The vines were wrapped everywhere around me, a maternal embrace so complete, so familiar, that it pulled the stress from my body, leaving me relaxed for the first time since I had left for work. It was going to be all right. Everything was going to be all right.

The forest sang around me, wordless songs of conquest and hunger and the stars, and I slept in its embrace, aware that I was dreaming, equally aware that the dream was finally, blissfully coming to an end.

4.

When I woke up, the sun was shining through the clouds, and the scent of honey was gone. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a step had been taken—a step that had been in progress since long before I was taken, long before I was returned.

Ready, whispered the voice of the forest, and I was. Oh, yes. I was.