Page 35 of Overgrowth

Seattle, Washington: August 17, 2031

Invasion nearing its conclusion

1.

Unlike the scout ship we’d seen in Tucson, which had been acting autonomously and didn’t have any precious cargo to protect, our borrowed vessel landed gently. It touched down in the middle of the airport runways, sinking its tangled roots deep into the concrete, cracking it into a million useless chunks and shards. It settled slowly into its new cradle in the earth, digging those roots deeper by the second, making itself an immovable part of the landscape. How true that immovability was was really anyone’s guess: I couldn’t have said one way or the other.

The vines that had been holding us in our “seats”—shelf fungus teased into a shape that would accommodate human anatomy, if only just—released us, whipping back into the walls like seatbelts snapping back into their cradles. Toni stretched, hopped out of her seat, and wandered across the crampedd cabin to the tangled seam of the door.

“This thing shouldn’t be airtight,” she said cheerfully. “Unless the two of you are putting out enough oxygen to compensate for massive leakage, what we’re looking at is a literal violation of the laws of a reasonable universe. Aren’t aliens fun? Isn’t alien biotech fun ?”

“I think you broke her,” said Mandy, looking toward Jeff. Apparently, he had the title of “official alien” for our little mission. That was somewhat of a relief. I’d been afraid it would go to me.

“That one came pre-broken,” said Jeff.

“Not true,” said Toni. “I was perfectly functional before one of your asshole flowers decided to have a go at eating me. Now I figure I’m entitled to do whatever the hell I want, and that includes criticizing your technology. It’s like someone let the set designer from Troll come up with an entire alien civilization.”

Desperately wishing David had come with us after all, I slid off my own fungus and crossed to where Graham was still seated, looking moodily down at his hands. I touched his shoulder. He raised his head.

“Hey,” I said. Then, needlessly, I added, “We’re here.”

“Seattle,” he said, and laughed mirthlessly. “We’re finally home. Only took how many days past when we were supposed to get here?”

“Better late than never.”

“Better never than whatever this is.” He looked back down. “This is it, Stasia. Once we walk out of that hatch, we’re part of the invasion.”

I wanted to tell him we already were, or at least, I already was: I’d been a part of the invasion since the beginning, and all the time we’d spent together with him thinking I was human, or on the side of humanity, had been a lie. I wanted to tell him he’d had plenty of opportunities to run, to go back to the safety of his own species and live out the dying days of a world that had come to the attention of something bigger and colder and crueler than it was. I wanted to say so many things. I swallowed them like the bitter pills they were, feeling them coil and snarl in my stomach, one more thorn briar I could never cut away.

“Yeah,” I said.

Graham sighed and stood. He hesitated for a moment, looking at his own trembling hands like he’d never seen them before, like they belonged to someone else. Someone better. Then he offered one of them to me, lifting his head, meeting my eyes, and forcing the smallest of smiles.

“I guess if I had to be a traitor to my species and my planet, I would want to do it with you,” he said, and twined his fingers into mine, holding tight.

I smiled back. I couldn’t do anything else. No matter how conflicted my feelings about Earth and humanity might be becoming, my feelings about Graham hadn’t changed. He was the man I loved. He was the man who loved me. Everything else was, essentially, secondary.

Jeff was the last to stand, following a few beats after Mandy as we all gathered at the hatch. “I wish this thing had a window,” he said. “No way of knowing what’s out there.”

“If there’s not something there already, there will be in a few moments,” I said. “We weren’t exactly subtle when we landed.”

“True enough,” he said, and leaned forward to slide his hand between a gap in two of the vines. There was a thick squelching sound, like his fingers were sinking into mud. Then, with little warning and less fanfare, the vines began unlacing themselves. It was a slow process at first, escalating quickly into a full unraveling. A seam of grayish light appeared around the hatch’s edge.

Then the last vine withdrew, and the hatch gaped open, displaying the familiar shape of Mt. Rainier. Seeing the mountains was like coming home all by itself. Until that moment, I hadn’t really considered that leaving the planet would mean leaving the mountains. Of course it would—there was no other option—but they had been there for my entire life, always welcoming me, always waiting for the sun to rise so they could come out and say hello. The thought of giving them up ached.

“My God,” breathed Graham, jerking my attention away from the mountains and onto what should probably have been the first thing to catch my eye: the black curls of smoke rising in the distance from what had been the city of Seattle.

The airport was a blackened husk. No planes came or went; no baggage trains snaked across the tarmac. Even without our scout ship shattering the runway, it would have been impossible for any large aircraft to land here. The broken bodies of fallen planes were scattered across the ground, preventing anything with a longer landing path than a Cessna from touching down.

Motion from the ground caught my eye. I leaned forward. A ring of people was forming around the base of our ship, no more than a dozen so far, with more on their way.

About half of them were green.

The ones who weren’t green wore green scarves around their upper arms, or green eyeshadow streaked across their cheeks like a badge. Two had green hair that had come out of a bottle, not an alien ecosystem, their roots showing respectively blond and brunette beneath the covering dye. Each of the green people was clutching the hand of at least one non-green person, holding tight, like they were afraid we had come from the sky to steal their hearts away.

One of the green people—a man about ten years older than me, with a tangled beard that looked almost like moss, and skin the color of cabbage leaves—stepped forward, letting go of his human companion and showing us his empty hands.

“Peace,” he called. “Please, peace.”

Behind him, the human man—the same age, but with brown skin, brown hair, and soft, mammalian hands—took a step back, shielding the children who had been pressed in behind the pair. A boy and a girl. My breath caught. I had known, from me and Graham, that it was possible for my kind to feel human enough to fall in love and try to make a life here on Earth, even as we told everyone around us that this wasn’t our world to worry about. I had never considered that there might be children.

“What are you all doing here?” asked Jeff. His tone was less sour than it normally was, tangled up with confusion and amazement. Whatever he’d been expecting to find when we touched down, it wasn’t this small mob of survivors, with their mixture of Earth and alien biologies.

“We saw the streak in the sky,” said the man. “We knew the government would come to intercept, but they can’t move as quickly on the roads as we can through the trees. We got here first.”

None of the green people were wearing shoes, I realized, and many of the humans had blackberry scratches on their arms and faces. They must have fought their way through the woods on foot, the aliens leading them through an environment that was becoming more familiar, more welcoming by the hour.

Most of the scratches weren’t deep, and the ones that looked as if they might have been were packed with dirt, keeping the blood from rising to the surface. That was probably for their own protection. Running around while openly bleeding would have been a good way to get themselves attacked by their own allies.

“What do you want ?” asked Jeff.

The man’s face fell. “You’re not here to get us?” he asked.

“Where are you from?” I blurted. All eyes turned toward me. “I’ve lived in Seattle almost my entire life, and I’ve never seen any of you in the forest. I thought I was the only one.”

“My husband and I live in Portland,” said the man.

“Denver,” said a woman with hair like a river of jade flowing down the middle of her back.

“Vancouver,” said another man. He pushed his glasses nervously up the bridge of his nose and added, “BC. I’m Canadian.”

“Hope you brought your passport,” said the human woman next to him, and he laughed, and she smiled, and it was beautiful. It couldn’t be anything other than beautiful. From the way Graham’s hand tightened on mine, I knew he agreed.

One by one, the aliens called out their places of origin, and none of them were closer than a few hundred miles. We’d been living so near each other for so long, unaware that we weren’t the only ones, isolated by our dreams of infinite forests and talking, whispering flowers. We could have supported one another, if we had only known; if we had been as fortunate as the senator, who’d been able to marry one of us and have a little time, in his own home, where there were no masks, and where there was no need for disbelief.

I wondered how his wife was doing. Hopefully, she hadn’t been caught in whatever net NASA was casting. Hopefully, she wasn’t standing trial for her host’s murder.

“Please,” repeated the bearded man. “We need to get out of here. The people on… God, I don’t even know what the sides here are. The people who come from this planet will kill us if they find us, or worse.”

“Alan, you’ll scare the kids,” chided his human partner.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but maybe it’s time the kids were scared.” Alan shook his head. “There were a lot more of us two days ago. We need to get off of this planet.”

“Yeah, about that,” said Toni. “You get that like, the only place to go from here is up to the mothership, right? And what they do there, that’s probably also going to scare the kids.”

“We know,” said Alan, and his eyes were tired. Of course they knew. He knew what he was, and the compulsions our parents gave us meant his husband would have known almost as soon as they met, would have been at least a little prepared when the alien signals started playing on the television and the skin started sloughing off the man he loved.

They had children. If Alan was anything like me, he had never forgotten his own second birth—or third, if we counted the moment when the seed took root in fertile soil. He knew what waited for his husband, for his children, when he took them home to meet the family. It would be a form of survival. Not as they were now, but as David hoped to be, green and growing and safe among the stars.

“Take the ship,” I blurted.

Mandy and Graham looked at me with understanding; Toni and Jeff, united for one rare moment, looked at me with confusion.

“ What? ” demanded Jeff.

“We’re not using it,” I said. “There will be other scout ships. We can get back to the seed ship on one of them, or we can hitch a ride with First. But we don’t have kids with us. We haven’t been fighting this for days.”

We hadn’t seen Seattle burn. It was difficult to guess who might have started the fires. I wanted to say it had been the humans, that their anger and fear had boiled over into striking out even when it was as likely to hurt them as it was to stop the invaders. First had claimed we were going to preserve the best parts of humanity, and so many of those good parts were stored in the cities. It didn’t make sense to start out by setting everything in sight on fire.

In the end, it probably didn’t matter. Burnt was burnt. Destroyed was destroyed. I looked at the faces of these refugees from a war that had crossed a cosmos to be with them, and realized how easy we’d had it in some ways. We’d been able to get ahead of the invasion. Yeah, it meant we’d been imprisoned and prodded and treated as the bellwethers of all the horrors yet to come, but we hadn’t been standing on home ground when the sky caught fire. There were going to be so many losses in this fight that we never understood. There already had been.

“I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” said the woman with the long green hair, sounding dismayed.

“Neither do we,” I replied. “The scout ships are semi-autonomous.” They had birthing flowers worked into their engines, homing pigeons from another world. “It’ll get you back to the ship we came from safely, if that’s really where you want to go. I think it’s going to be a tight fit for all of you, but you can make it work.”

“Thank you,” said Alan, with a sincerity so heartfelt, it burned. “Thank you so much.”

“Just get out of here.” The five of us climbed down from the ship, Graham holding my hand the whole way, Mandy pressing in close behind us, like she thought she could split herself in two and dissolve into our bodies, protecting herself from everything that had yet to come. Jeff and Toni followed at a slightly greater distance, Jeff scowling the whole way. He would probably have argued with me if not for the fact that he knew we couldn’t defeat them: if this group decided to rush and overpower us, we’d be lost, and they’d have the ship anyway. This way, we looked like the good guys.

This way, maybe First would send us another ride home.

They filed past us, up the wide gangway into the mouth of the scout ship, where they began compacting themselves into the available seats. Alan and his husband shared one of the fungus seats, their children sitting on the floor, pressed against their legs, so scared they wouldn’t look at anything but each other. Were they going to be sorry about that later, these fleeing children of Earth? Sorry that they hadn’t taken one more look at the mountains, one more look at a genuine sky? Or were they going to be grateful they’d used that time memorizing what their sibling looked like in a shade other than green?

When the last of them was inside, the hatch—somehow seeming to understand what had just happened—lifted up and swung closed. We watched the vines tie themselves tight around the opening, sealing it against the dangers of space. Then the scout ship pulled its roots laboriously out of the ground, unwinding from its temporary home, and launched itself upward, almost like it was leaping away.

That first great push sent it a good twenty feet into the air. Only then, at the apex of its jump, did the impossible jets come on, spouting great plumes of fire that bore it up, up, up into the smoky sky, until it dwindled into a speck against the gray-streaked blue, and we were standing alone in the ruins of what man had made.