Page 37 of Overgrowth

Chapter 20

Somewhere over Washington State: August 17, 2031

Invasion nearing its conclusion

1.

The wind whipped around me, icy cold and unforgiving. If there had been any human skin left clinging to my body, the wind would have had it off in a second, leaving me to plummet undisguised and whole toward the distant, waiting world.

From this far up, there didn’t seem to be any cities, no highways or houses or other signs of mankind’s dominion. There was only the green, endless green stretching on as far as the eye could see, like a promise of a world reborn. A world after the invasion, when the garden would be free to grow again, providing a home to whatever came next. Maybe they would be better, the inheritors of Earth. Maybe when our seeds fell from the sky again, and their own children came to them claiming to be the edge of an invasion, they would answer the request with pleas for peace. It could happen. In a universe where body-stealing plants from space were the greatest threat anyone had ever known, it could happen.

The wind was whipping my tears away before they could fall, keeping them from freezing against my cheeks. I forced my eyes to stay open, watching the ground as it got closer. It was going to hurt when I hit, I knew that, but I also knew it wouldn’t hurt for long. That was one nice thing about plummeting to my death: no time for the pain to linger.

Although it would be better if there was no pain at all. I tried to catch my breath, coughing as the wind whipped that away to join my tears. I didn’t need air anymore. I was a plant. I was a plant, and I was falling through the sunlight, and this was fine, oh, this was perfectly fine.

I closed my eyes.

The pollen filled the scout ships and the seed ships, generated by a thousand conversion flowers, sticking to everything it touched, allowing the opening of a localized forest. I wouldn’t have been able to speak to First, or Second, or the Swift if not for the pollen; our mouths were shaped too differently. The pollen was here, too. It came from us somehow, the products of those conversion flowers, their walking, talking descendants, who were shaped like men but never would be, not really, not in the place where body met bone. I knew the pollen was here, even if First hadn’t told me so, because we made the forest between us when we slept, didn’t we? We reached out for one another’s hearts and minds, and we found them, and we spun a world that didn’t exist in the space we made. We were of our unnamed alien world as much as we were of Earth, and that meant we had the potential to do anything our alien forefathers could do.

When Second spoke to me through the pollen, when the flowers of the forest used it to relay the complicated thoughts First said they were incapable of having, it felt like a bend in the back of my mind, like a crimp in the place where thoughts were supposed to go. I reached.

Help, I thought. Please help. I am falling.

No: that wasn’t right. It lacked the heft and weight of speech, rather than silence. I still couldn’t breathe, was still falling, but had no idea how much longer that situation was going to last. I didn’t want to open my eyes. If I opened my eyes, I would know how much time I had left, and that wasn’t going to help my focus.

Help, I thought, louder. The world clicked, becoming crystalline and clear, and // help // I thought, feeling it flow out from me like sap from a wounded tree, like the last of my fragile humanity washing away.

// help // I said, shouted, screamed into the empty void of air and sky and descent, once more a tumbling seedpod caught in gravity’s embrace, unable to free myself, hoping for salvation. // help, I’m falling, please come, please help. //

// cousin. //

The voice was far away and faint, barely touching the edges of my awareness. I strained toward it, continuing to shout silently into the void. // help, I’m falling, please help me, I don’t want to die. //

// cousin, make yourself large as you can, cousin, hold fast, I come, I come. //

Make myself… I spread my arms and legs, trying to increase my surface area and resistance to the air. I continued to fall, and I couldn’t tell whether the shift in my position had done anything to change the speed of my descent. Still, a feeling of approval washed over me, wordless and concrete.

// cousin, I am coming. //

I fell.

// cousin, look to the west. //

I opened my eyes. I looked.

A creature—a person, someone who was biologically more similar to me than I was to Graham or Mandy, but it was hard to let go of a lifetime’s worth of thoughts and opinions, and everything I knew told me this was a creature, a monster, a beast—flew toward me, vast, leathery wings slapping at the sky like it flew through the sheer force of its determination. It looked like a six-limbed predatory dinosaur, complete with tufted feathers on the end of its long, whiplike tail and crowning its narrow-jawed, small-eyed head. It was a thing out of a nightmare, cutting through the air with claws extended and jaws open wide.

It was cast entirely in shades of green, in jade and emerald and tourmaline, and it was beautiful, and it was my cousin. I could tell that with a glance. We had been planted on different worlds, sprouted from different seed lines, but we were family all the same, and it was coming to save me.

// let go // hissed its voice.

Obediently, I went as limp as I could, trying to release the natural tension from my limbs. I was still falling, and my body fought against the relaxation, refusing to let go of the fear and adrenaline that was coursing through my veins. I couldn’t breathe. I was falling, and I couldn’t breathe.

// you are safe // hissed the cousin, and snatched me out of the air.

The impact was painful, even with as much care as it was taking. Its claws closed around my torso and clamped down, not hard enough to break the skin or do more than bruise me, but hard enough to yank me out of my descent. The sound of leathery wings beating became the loudest thing in the entire world. Everything seemed to snap to a painful halt, my head whipping forward until it slammed into one thick, muscular leg.

Things went hazy for a little while after that. When my vision cleared, we were flying smoothly through the sapphire sky, the cousin humming a soft, almost affectionate tune that vibrated its entire chest and throat. It sounded like a happy eagle.

// cousin // it said, joy coloring its tone. // you wake. you wake. how did you come to fall from so far? this world granted you no wings. // There was a certain quiet pity in its last statement, like it couldn’t understand how we’d managed to accomplish anything of merit without wings.

// I was on a plane // I said. Now that I knew how to reach the place in my mind that was designed for communication within my copse, it seemed easier, almost more natural than verbal communication. Part of that may have been the lack of air. I wasn’t dying, but speech required having something to make it function. With my lungs lying fallow in my chest, there wasn’t anything to make the words emerge.

// plane? //

// a machine that flies. like the ships, but designed to function within a planetary atmosphere. //

// what a clever garden this has been! // The cousin sounded both surprised and pleased, like this had been something it had never considered. // where should I release you? //

Where… // can you find the plane? //

// I can find anything, if it is in the sky. //

// can you take me to the plane, and follow until it lands? I do not want to lose track of my friends, but I do not want the people who have control of the plane to know that I survived. //

Amusement and pleasure washed over me. // a hunt! for you, small cousin, I can hunt. what are you called? //

// Stasia. //

// I am Hunter. //

For the first time, I wondered whether the strangely literal names of all the aliens I’d met so far were a function of the translation provided by the pollen. When I gave them my name, did they hear “Stasia,” or did they hear the meaning of my full, given name? Anastasia. She who will be reborn.

Maybe it was more fitting than I thought.

// how did you find me so quickly? it seems strange that you should be nearby. //

// your First asked that we watch for you, once you chose to return to the garden. I was near enough to hear your call. //

Hunter tore through the sky, powerful muscles moving it forward like a marathon runner as it sought the missing plane. It was doing this for me. It was a person, as surely as I was. Suddenly, thinking of my cousin as an “it” felt wrong.

// what are your pronouns? //

// what are pronouns? //

// um. they say what gender you are. boy or girl or both or neither. //

// ah! // Again, delight colored Hunter’s mental tone. // my template was made to be a fertilizer of eggs. it brings me great joy to go through the motions, even as there are no eggs now to be sparked into a new generation. //

It took me a moment to realize what Hunter was saying. // so… he, then? //

// yes, cousin // replied my amused relation. // it is not so important to my cultivar as it is to yours, but I know your host garden places much weight on such words, and so I thank you for asking. //

Somehow, being carried through the sky by a dinosaur-dragon hybrid who gleefully acknowledged his fondness for sex wasn’t the strangest part of my week. In a weird way, it was sort of reassuring. If Hunter still enjoyed sex, whatever form that took for his host species, that meant Graham and I could still have sex after we were both plant people. Assuming I got to Graham before Agent Brown and her flunkies hurt him. My reassurance collapsed like a punctured soufflé.

Agent Brown had Graham and Mandy. Agent Brown had every reason to assume they were collaborators, helping my people infiltrate this planet from the outside. Never mind that we’d fallen from space and infiltrated all by ourselves, even when we didn’t know we were doing it. We were the enemy, we were from somewhere else, and anyone who had helped us needed to be held accountable.

Hunter’s claws were tight around my waist. I put a hand on one of his talons, bracing myself, and silently decided that if she had harmed a hair on either of their heads, I would end her.

Silent, equipped by the evolutionary forces of another world to be the perfect predator, Hunter flew on.

2.

We caught up with the plane just before the Canadian border. Hunter fell into a comfortable glide behind it, using the wake of its displaced air to lift him easily up. He hummed as he coasted, utterly content in the moment, in the sky, in the hunt.

The sky… // what do you do on the ships? // I asked.

// the fruits of my host garden hunger for sky // he replied. // it is not common, for a shape to have such a need for a thing that it can overwhelm the message of the Great Root, but it does happen. we thirst to fly, to feel the wind around us, bearing us up and onward. on the ships, we sleep and study and lie as close to dormant as we may, and when a new garden is to come to harvest, we are released. this garden has good skies, cousin. before we leave them, they will be filled with the wings of my harvest, and we will bid them sweet farewell before the ships move on. //

// will some of you stay here? //

// not when the harvest is done // he replied. // the garden must be allowed to recover in peace. but we will remember these skies always, and remember them well. we wi—//

Whatever he’d been intending to say was cut off as what sounded like a cannon exploded somewhere below us, and a hole the size of my torso was torn in the membrane of one wing. He howled, both aloud and inside my head, and I clapped my hands over my ears as if that would make any difference.

// hold fast! // he shouted, and launched himself higher, wings working harder than ever to compensate for the damage. The weapon fired again, but missed its mark as he curved backward, out of the projectile’s path. The wind bit at my face and eyes. I clung to his talon as hard as I could, refusing to consider the chance that I could still fall. I refused to have come this far and die as if all my efforts had been for nothing.

// low // warned Hunter, and folded himself into a dive so steep it felt like the skin was going to peel away from my flesh. No roller coaster had ever been that extreme, no drop that sheer, and I would have screamed if I’d been able to find the breath to do so. Instead, I clung to his talon, closing my eyes against the friction of the air beating down on them, and waited for it to be over.

Hunter shrieked, rage and defiance and pain, and the cannon spoke one more time, and I couldn’t open my eyes, I didn’t dare. But our continued descent didn’t feel any more out-of-control than it had before, and when Hunter hissed // land // in the space behind my eyes, I was able to brace myself for impact.

We hit the field still moving slightly too fast for safety, Hunter clutching me in his foreclaws while his hind legs pedaled frantically, trying to find purchase in the grassy earth. His stumbling turned into a run, and he slowed only momentarily, only long enough to drop me before he was launching himself back into the air. I staggered to my feet, preparing to shout after him, and stopped as I saw what he was doing:

The grass in the field was too tall to be tended regularly, but there were fences, and there were cattle. The rancher must have turned them out before fleeing, choosing to let them have a chance rather than leaving them to starve in the safety of their stalls. A big bull had assembled a small herd of his own, and was now lowering his head menacingly, pawing at the ground as he tried to figure out whether Hunter and I posed a threat.

I might be the smaller of the two of us: I was also the one on the ground, and the one who wore a shape he recognized, close enough to human to read as an intruder of a type he’d seen before. He snorted hard and began to charge, leaving his cows behind, breaking away from the herd. As soon as he was far enough from them that targeting wouldn’t be an issue, Hunter dropped out of the sky and landed in the middle of the bull’s back, teeth snapping at the great bovine’s neck and claws digging deep into its flesh. The bull bellowed, snapping its head back in an effort to gore Hunter with its horns. Hunter responded by tearing out its throat.

Blood spurted from the bull in a huge, hot gush, the iron-filing smell of it hitting me even as far away as I was. I stayed frozen, my legs starting to shake with the sheer depth of my wanting, of my need. There was so much blood, so much, and it wasn’t human, but in that moment, that didn’t seem to matter. To a starving man, a candy bar will serve as well as a steak dinner. Human and bovine blood were basically the same thing anyway, so close to identical that it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, it didn’t—

Hunter raised his head, mouth open in a silent scream of dominance and triumph that I didn’t need to hear to understand. On his own world, under his own sky, he would have screamed out loud, I knew that much. He would have roared until the horizon rang with his ascension. But here and now, he was keeping the volume of his victory contained, giving me the opportunity to catch up with the rest of my party while they still thought we’d been shot down.

Lowering his head, he began to feast, not just drinking the blood, but ripping out great chunks of the bull’s side, letting its guts spill steaming onto the grass. That was too much for me. I broke into a run, half-staggering by the time I reached the carcass and dropped to my knees beside it, grabbing for a piece of severed flesh. It oozed with blood, and when I brought it to my mouth, the taste was the sweetest thing I had ever known. I closed my eyes as I swallowed again and again, suckling that chunk of muscle and tendon like it was a lollipop.

Something nudged my shoulder. I raised my head and opened my eyes to find Hunter looking down on me, something like amusement in his massive green eyes. There were chunks of bull stuck between his teeth, splashes of red on his scales, and he, like every other member of my newly extended family I had met, was beautiful.

// are you fed, cousin? // He extended his wings, showing that the hole was gone, patched over with regrown membrane almost indistinguishable from the tissue around it. That would be the blood again. As long as we fed fast, we might as well be indestructible.

Had the humans figured that out yet? Or had they slaughtered the ones foolish enough to come into range fast enough and completely enough that it hadn’t mattered? We’d find out soon.

“I’m fed,” I said, aloud, and was pleased when he bobbed his head in acknowledgment of my words. The pollen was still playing translator. Which meant…

Feeling suddenly shy, I asked, “Can you say your name for me? I want to hear what it sounds like in the air.”

The crest of feathers atop Hunter’s head rose in unmistakable pleasure before he opened his mouth and emitted a deep grumbling noise, like tectonic plates rubbing together. It was short and sharp and utterly distinct from the other brief vocalizations I had heard him make. I smiled.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

He chuffed, and hopped down from the bull, extending his forelimbs toward me. I stepped into his embrace, feeling the security of his claws closing around my torso. This time, when he launched himself into the air, I was able to enjoy it.

We flew low above the trees, Hunter dipping into their pine-scented canopy with the ease of long practice. How many worlds had he flown over? How many types of tree had he played hide-and-seek with as he pursued the goals of invasion? Whatever the number, he had learned their offered lessons well: he flew like he had been tracking prey through this forest for a hundred years, like he already knew every secret it had to offer.

Branches whipped at my face, and I raised an arm to ward them off, laughing in soft delight at the ridiculousness of it all. I was being carried over the Canadian border by a giant predatory dinosaur from another world, and I was perfectly safe, perfectly sound, with a belly full of blood and a head full of vengeance.

Whatever military unit had shot us down as we followed the plane wasn’t watching for us to come back so quickly, or so much lower in the sky. We skimmed the trees until we could see the silver glint of the plane ahead of us, flying so much higher that we probably weren’t even on their radar.

// there // said Hunter.

// yes // I agreed. // stay low. //

Only amusement answered me. I supposed I deserved it, for telling someone with so much more experience than I had how to hunt. Hunter stayed low, and the plane flew on, until at last it began to tilt forward, going into its descent. Still we followed at our safe, low distance, until the airfield came into view.

It was clear that the plane was angling for a landing on the main runway. It would be virtually impossible for anyone to pick us off without also risking them. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than Hunter was putting on a burst of speed, catching easily up with the little jet, which had never been designed to outrun something like him. Nothing on Earth had been designed to outrun something like him.

We flew close enough that I caught a glimpse of Graham’s face through the window, his eyes wide and amazed by the sight of my saurian cousin even before he saw me clasped in Hunter’s claws. Joy washed away Graham’s amazement, suffusing his face before we dropped lower and he was blocked from sight by the edge of one great green wing.

// your mate? // asked Hunter.

// for now // I said.

// do not worry, little cousin. love survives the death of flesh remarkably well, when love is there. // Hunter’s thoughts were warm, and for the first time, I caught an image to go with the idea: Hunter and two other, larger dinosaur-creatures, both with plumage in a darker green, swirling through an elaborate dance in the sky above a world I had never seen. His mates.

// they’re beautiful. //

// we all are, in the green. //

The plane was starting to touch the concrete. Hunter dropped lower, hind legs moving in a running motion even before they made contact with the ground. There was barely a bump when he went from gliding to racing alongside the great silver machine. There was a moment when I feared the plane might decide to go back up. The moment passed; the plane’s engines powered down, and it rolled toward its destination.

A motorcade, parked across the runway. Eight black cars. People with guns. And a small group of what I took for politicians, dressed in rumpled suitcoats and trousers, their hair disarrayed by the wind and the stresses of our situation. They looked like they were holding it together somewhat better than Agent Brown was.

Hunter was running ahead of the plane now, his legs propelling him faster than their engines. He angled toward the motorcade, lowering his head and making a high-pitched screeching sound that I interpreted as a warning. He didn’t slow at all, continuing at full speed until we were close enough to the gathered politicians to see their expressions. The guards, as one, raised their weapons, preparing to fire.

A woman—silver-haired, wearing a lilac shell top under her charcoal jacket—stepped forward, raising her hands. “Guns down, ” she snapped.

The guards lowered their weapons.

Hunter came to a stop.

It was a sudden thing, that stop: one second, he was running, and the next, he was turning his feet sideways, talons digging into the concrete, wings fanning out to increase wind resistance and bring us to a halt. His tail whipped forward, forming a barrier between me and those weapons. Of the two of us, I was by far the smaller and more fragile, and I had a brief moment of understanding what it must have been like for the young of his host race’s people, back when they thought their planet was their own.

“It’s okay, Hunter,” I said, with a wary look at the guards and their guns. “You can put me down.”

// you know these meat things? //

“I’m pretty sure that one”—I indicated the woman—“is the Vice-President of the United States, so yeah, I know these meat things. Put me down.”

“You can talk to it?” asked one of the guards, horror and confusion in his tone.

Hunter set me gently on the tarmac, uncurling his talons from around my waist. I reached back and put a hand on his arm, leaving it resting there as I replied, in an utterly even tone, “He’s my cousin.”

“Are you here to discuss terms?” asked the woman. The longer I looked at her, the more positive I became that she was Vice-President Bethany Rogers, who should have been looking toward the election right about now, and not considering her options for fighting off an alien invasion. “We were told you would be sending a team to discuss terms.” Her eyes ran over my filthy clothes, my bare feet, my bloodstained hands, and found every inch of me wanting. I wasn’t an eight-foot-tall monster with a bubble helmet over my head, or an unspeakable horror that could never have arisen on this world. Hunter was close, but me?

I was just a woman. Pretty enough, unremarkable save for the part where I had somehow been cast entirely in green, rendered alien by the color of my skin and hair and nothing else. She could have passed me in the aisle at the grocery store. Probably had once, before she’d risen high enough politically to have her own security forces and call signs; she’d started life as a junior Congresswoman from the state of Oregon, and like all good Washington girls, I had been going there for the tax-free shopping since I was old enough to drive a car.

I was nothing. I was nobody. I certainly wasn’t the end of the human race in blue jeans and a tattered blouse, and yet here she was, and here I was, and the sound of the plane behind me had cut off; the rest of the players in this little scene would be approaching soon, if they weren’t already.

“Agent Brown had her men throw me out of a moving plane,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and level as I could. “You might want to tell her that’s not a good look when you’re getting ready to negotiate a surrender. Although I could thank her, I guess. I would never have hooked up with Hunter, here, if I hadn’t been falling to my death.”

“You have my sincere apologies,” said the vice-president, in sincerely. “She acted on her own initiative, and not due to orders from me.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s cool, and it’s not like she’s going to get the chance to do it again. But she still has two of my friends, both human, in her custody. I want them back. Unharmed. Now.”

“I’m sure you see where I cannot authorize the release of American citizens into the hands of an alien power.”

“Cool,” I said. “I’m sure you can see where they are literally the last thing keeping me from telling Hunter here that we don’t need any of you alive.” There was a low growl from behind me. Several of the guards took a step back. I guessed Hunter was showing off the size and quality of his teeth. “I’m not asking for prisoners. I’m not asking for the unwilling. I’m asking for my friends. ”

Why would First send us down as the contact team? She knew I wasn’t qualified, that none of us had any experience with hostage negotiation or brokering peace. Not that she was looking for peace. The first responses of the humans had been what she expected, violence and fear and confusion, and the time for peace had passed. We were going to harvest this world, whether they liked it or not. We were going to take the best parts of humanity into ourselves and set them among the stars. As for the worst parts of humanity…

The worst parts would nuke the planet just to keep it out of alien hands. The fact that it hadn’t happened yet only told me some people still believed—erroneously—that they could win. As soon as they figured out the tide had turned, they’d be priming the switches and setting the silos to blow. Because that was what humans did. They broke their toys so no one else could play with them. They unleashed plagues and they burned down cities and they acted shocked and horrified when people called them on their actions, but they did it anyway. Over and over again, they did it anyway.

“If she has harmed either of them, if you order her to harm either of them, if you allow harm to come to either of them, I will tell my cousin to call his siblings, and the last thing you see will be like something out of a dark reboot of Captain Planet, ” I said. My voice didn’t shake. For the first time in days, it felt completely steady. “You will die here, all of you, and it won’t matter if you shoot me—you know how to kill me, I’m made like a human being, blow my brains out and it’s over—because you’re going to be outnumbered.”

“Humanity still owns this planet,” snapped Vice-President Rogers.

“Numerically, sure. But I don’t see humanity here. I see you. Twelve of you. And you could probably take out me, and you might take out Hunter, but not before we sound the alarm, and it won’t take long before you’re facing way more than twelve of us. So how about we all play nicely, and we all have a chance at walking away?”

Footsteps behind me. Footsteps, and the distinctive sound of guns being cocked. Vice-President Rogers’s head snapped up, eyes widening in clear alarm.

“Hold your fire!” she shouted. “No one is to fire! They’re friendlies!”

“No, we’re not,” I said, turning to look around Hunter and grinning with ghoulish glee when I saw Mandy and Graham walking alongside Agent Brown and her people. Both had their hands cuffed in front of them, and Graham’s lip was split, probably from his struggles to get to me before I could be thrown off the plane, but they were otherwise all right. They were otherwise just fine.

Graham stopped walking for a beat when he saw me peering around the admittedly alarming giant green lizard. Then he broke into a run, not seeming to care that he wouldn’t be able to catch himself if he fell. “ Stasia! ”

“Hi, sweetie.” I stepped around Hunter. Graham collided with me, and I threw my arms around him, breathing in the scent of him, who he was, who he would always be. It was distinct and singular and stronger than the smell of blood. Thankfully.

He pressed his face against the crook of my neck, breathing in deeply in turn before he whispered, “I saw you fall.”

“I know. I know you saw.” I lifted my head to look at Agent Brown and her people with every ounce of hatred I possessed. One of them had a hand wrapped tightly around Mandy’s upper arm, keeping her from following Graham to safety. “I’m so sorry, Graham. That should never have happened.”

Agent Brown looked at me impassively, cold resignation in her eyes. She knew she had lost. Maybe she realized how badly she had fucked up by deciding to dispose of me. It didn’t really matter either way.

“Let her go, and uncuff them both,” I said, in a voice that was surprisingly clear, and surprisingly cold. I had no more sympathy left in me. Somewhere between an observatory in Maine and a runway in Washington, it had all been bled away. “I am not here to negotiate with you.”

“Madame Vice-President, have you been hurt?” Agent Brown put her hand on the butt of her gun. “Please indicate if you are here under duress.”

They probably had a complicated system of signs and countersigns to tell each other when they were in trouble. They probably had a whole world of espionage on their sides. Me, I had a flying dinosaur from space, a cosplayer, and a herpetologist.

I had never felt more in command of a situation.

“Stand down,” said Vice-President Rogers. “I am unharmed. May I ask why you saw fit to collect the representative we had been told was coming, only to expel her from your plane?”

“That sounds so much nicer than ‘throw her out,’ doesn’t it?” I asked, glancing at Graham.

I was expecting amusement, or anger. Instead, I got blank-eyed sorrow, and a pallor that spoke of panic so deep that it refused to be easily shaken off. I touched his cheek before turning my attention back to Agent Brown.

“Let them go,” I said.

“She’s not the representative,” snapped Agent Brown. “She’s just another damn alien. We had this one in custody before everything went to shit. She’s a lab specimen. ”

Hunter growled, low and deep in his throat. That answered one question. Whether he could understand English or was getting a translation relayed through the pollen, he didn’t like what he was hearing.

“My cousin doesn’t appreciate you calling me names,” I said mildly. “Remove the cuffs.”

“Do as she asks, Agent,” said the vice-president wearily. “It’s a small concession.”

“We shouldn’t be making concessions at all.” Agent Brown produced a set of keys and used them to undo Mandy’s cuffs. Handing the keys over, she said, “You can unlock your friend.”

Mandy didn’t say a word. She just spun on her heel and ran to where Graham and I were waiting. He stuck his hands out. She uncuffed him, dropping both keys and handcuffs before she threw her arms around my neck and yanked me into a painfully tight embrace.

“I thought you were dead you bitch, ” she gasped, voice muffled and softened by the flesh of my neck.

I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Not dead,” I assured her. “Did you… did you want to say hello to Hunter? He’s my cousin.”

“Is Hunter the dinosaur?” she asked, without letting go.

“Yes.”

“I like your family more and more.”

Hunter made an amused clicking sound. // your small pet is amusing. //

“Hunter likes you too,” I translated. Turning back to the vice- president and her guards, I asked, “So are you it? Is this what remains of the United States government? Do you even have any power here? We’re in Canada. Doesn’t that make your presence politically fraught?”

“Cities are burning. People are dying. People are being abducted into alien vessels. No one has heard anything out of North Korea or Ireland in over a week. We’re losing touch with other areas daily. At this point, national borders seem less important than the safety of our species.”

“Right,” I said. “The president and prime minister took a vote and decided you were the expendable one, didn’t they?”

Vice-President Rogers’s cheeks flared red. Aloud, she said only, “I’m less essential to the function of the government than they are. I am proud to serve at the pleasure of the president.”

“Right,” I said. Graham was close to me, so close I could feel the heat coming off his skin, and Mandy was only a little farther away, watching warily. Agent Brown and her goons were behind us, but they didn’t frighten me anymore. They had no dangers left to offer.

There was a soft boom from somewhere far overhead, like something had entered our atmosphere with far more caution and control than the average meteor. I kept my eyes on the vice-president.

“We are not the diplomatic team,” I said quietly. “We are two aliens and two humans, three of whom grew up on this planet, all of whom would like to see this invasion end as quickly and cleanly as possible.”

“So you’re going to leave our planet and never come back,” said Vice-President Rogers.

“I think you and I both know that it’s way too late for that to happen,” I said regretfully—and I was genuinely sorry. Looking back, I could see all the places where humanity might have steered away from this result. If they had listened to their own children when we started claiming to be the vanguard of an invasion; if they had greeted the first proof that aliens were real with something other than fear…

It felt like I was justifying things to myself, and in a very real way, I was. If it had been up to me, the invasion would never have happened; would have been a few scout ships setting down and quietly collecting the people like me, the ones whose hearts beat with the tempo of another planet’s tides. They would have carried us, and our loved ones, away to the stars, and Earth would have been poorer by a few thousand people, but not at the center of a war. If it had been up to me, we would never have made this world a garden.

But my people had, and it was, and now there was no way left but forward, through the fire, into the cold inevitability on the other side.

“If you’re not the diplomatic team, why are you here?”

“To tell you the real diplomatic team is coming, and things will go better for you if you try not to be afraid of them.” I slipped my arm around Graham’s waist, and he did the same to me, the two of us holding each other in the face of the end of the world. It was all right, if things ended here. At least we would be reaching the end of our stories together.

I wished I’d married him, back when human institutions like marriage were more common. I wished I’d gone with him to the Everglades. Maybe the next owners of this world would rise from his invasive pythons or his beloved frogs, and when we sailed back this way in a million years, the seedlings would be like Hunter, dressed in scales, dancing through the skies.

Above us, the sound of the scout ship descending grew louder. The vice-president paled, and we all waited for the moment when the invasion would end.

3.

The ship set itself down with surpassing delicacy, roots driving themselves deep into the soil, shattering the runway in the pro cess. Hunter took a step back, displaying a degree of nervousness that spoke clearly to the role the scouts had played in taking his original world. Even if he now sided with his own species over the memory of that good garden, it’s hard to trust a machine that once carried the end of the world.

The vice-president and her people also fell back, the ones I had taken for politicians moving with her while the guards put themselves bodily between her and the settling ship. Seen from the outside, without a descent forceful enough to punch a hole in the world, the ship resembled nothing so much as a giant, hard-shelled seedpod, the sort of thing that could have fallen from any number of trees. One by one, the tiers of scaling began to separate, and I revised my impression: it was a vine-covered pinecone from space. Smaller, it could have been lost forever in any coniferous forest on Earth.

Once enough of the scales had lifted, the vines still wrapped around the inner core began letting go, revealing the door, which split into four equal pieces and peeled away, like the opening of a slow, strange flower.

First stepped out, onto the surface of the world.

Someone moaned behind me, from the direction of Agent Brown’s people. I heard a gun cock and whipped around, every nerve in my body shrieking alarm. Hunter shrieked a wild, dominant cry, picking up on my distress, and leapt into the air, wings snapping open as he dropped himself between the NASA team and First. Gunfire rent the air. Hunter screamed again. I whipped around in time to see him charging Agent Brown’s team, holes in his beautiful wings, pure fury in his tone.

“Call them off!” I turned back to the vice-president. “Tell them to stop firing, or he’s going to kill them all!”

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were fixed on First, on the specter of a spider the size of a fully grown ox stepping delicately to the ground.

I whirled again, running toward the scene unfolding behind me as the NASA agents fired and Hunter advanced, wounded but alive, determined to have his revenge.

I heard Mandy scream. I heard a gun fire. Hunter pounced, sending NASA agents tumbling in all directions as he bit the head clean off the nearest one, gulping it down before starting to rip his victim into pieces. The others shouted, trying to steady their weapons.

Slowly, I turned.

Mandy was on the ground between First and the vice-president’s group, blood spreading slowly from the gunshot wound in her chest. She wasn’t moving.