Page 38 of Overgrowth

Chapter 21

Vancouver, British Columbia: August 17, 2031

The end of the invasion

1.

First moved like lightning, faster than I would have dreamed possible for an arachnid of her size under gravity like ours. The physics of her body must have been bolstered by her vegetable nature, keeping her from collapsing under her own weight. She raced to Mandy’s side, a silk-like substance spurting from her abdomen, arms already working frantically at constructing a pale green cocoon around the body of my friend.

The shouts from the NASA agents were getting rarer as the snarls from Hunter grew more consistent. He was shredding them, ripping through them like so much tissue paper, and I couldn’t be sorry, not in the slightest, not in the least. I couldn’t wish them another ending, because they’d been the ones to start firing, and because of them, Mandy was—Mandy was—

I ran without thinking about it, ran straight for the Vice-President of the United States, a nice woman, a pleasant woman, a woman I had voted for, and my hand was raised, and my fist caught her square in the jaw, sending her reeling backward, so that her ass impacted with the side of one of those fine black cars that had been intended to get her here, to the slaughtering grounds, safely. Her guards shouted, beginning to turn on me, and she raised a hand.

They stopped dead. So did I, arm cocked back to hit her again. She looked at me with anguish in her eyes.

“This,” she said, “was never what I wanted.”

“Maybe not, but it’s what you’re getting,” I said. My voice was cold. The last of my mercy had leaked out onto the concrete along with Mandy’s blood. Mandy… I turned.

First had her neatly cocooned, completely obscured by veils of green silk. The vast spider lifted her head, and I knew she was looking at me, focusing on me with the full power of her many multifaceted eyes.

// she is not dead // she said. // she will not die until the cocoon is cut. you will have to choose for her, then, because she will not be able to choose for herself. //

“What’s she saying?” demanded Graham.

“Mandy’s alive.” I turned back to the vice-president. “Congratulations. If there was any prayer for humanity, it just got answered. Because I promise you, if she dies, I will tell my mother to burn everything mankind has ever made to the ground and salt the ashes to be sure that nothing ever grows there again. Do you understand me?”

The skin under Vice-President Rogers’s eye twitched. “Your… mother?”

“You’d probably think of her as ‘the spider.’ Her name is First, and she’s the diplomatic team. Good job trying to shoot her.” I glared at the guards, not making any effort to figure out which one had actually fired the gun. Let them all share the blame, unless they were willing to give up one of their own in the hopes of earning back a sliver of our favor.

This was human nature. This was understandable, even excusable, when viewed from a great-enough distance. We had scared them. We had forced them into a situation where they felt like they had to take a stand or lose everything. And none of that mattered, because the distance wasn’t there. Before we had done anything intentional, anything beyond existing, they had been prepared to kill us all.

Agent Brown had been right about one thing, even if she had been so perfectly, patently wrong about everything else: I wasn’t a citizen of the United States of America anymore. I wasn’t even a citizen of Earth. They’d been in such a hurry to throw me away that they had left me with nowhere to turn beyond the people of my origins, and now I was free to be what they had decided I was. I was free to be a monster.

First walked toward us, body low and knees high as she balanced her swollen abdomen against the cruel gravity of Earth. A hand touched my shoulder. I didn’t need to look to know that it was Graham. If one of the guards had even dared touch me, Hunter would have left his meal and slaughtered them for their audacity. I could hear him chirping and creeling as he gulped down limbs and viscera, healing the damage their bullets had done one mouthful at a time.

How many people had he just killed? How many lives?

How come I no longer cared?

// daughter, tell these humans that they have little time remaining. the Great Root has marked them, and the harvest is come. //

“My mother would like me to tell you to make your peace with God,” I said flatly.

“We thought…” Vice-President Rogers straightened. The skin along her jaw was beginning to bruise and swell. Speaking must have been painful. She did it anyway.

She probably thought she was being brave. She didn’t understand yet that the time for bravery was over.

“We thought this was going to be a negotiation,” she said. “I was sent to collect your diplomatic team and take them back with me to meet with the president and the prime minister. We have the United Nations standing by, as this is a global matter, and—”

// silence. //

“Be quiet,” I said.

First stepped closer. The tiny claws at the tips of her legs clutched the concrete, granting her perfect, seemingly effortless balance. The sunlight glittering off her carapace made her look even larger than she actually was.

// we have come to speak with those of you who would come to speak with us, not to travel at your pleasure // she said. Hunter prowled up behind her, dripping with blood. My stomach rumbled. She continued // we will not shut ourselves in one of your places, to be at the mercy if your kind. you have shown that you cannot be trusted. //

Dutifully, I relayed her words. The vice-president’s eyes flashed with anger.

“ We have shown that we can’t be trusted?” she demanded. “ Us? You’re the ones who infiltrated our planet! Who killed our children! We did not invite you here, and you came anyway!”

// we came on the winds of space; we did not choose you any more than you chose us // First implacably replied. // we did not intend harm to your children, but our children can be rough, as all children can. they acted out of instinct. for them, we apologize. they were innocent of what they did. for ourselves, we do not apologize. for you, we do not accept apology. //

Again, I relayed her words. The vice-president looked between me and First, seemingly unsure who she should address. In the end, she settled on me. I was the one who still looked almost human, even if she knew I was nothing of the sort.

“Please,” she said. “People are dying. Riots, fires, floods. Infrastructure is collapsing. Everywhere on Earth.”

That, then, was why the world had yet to end in nuclear fire or due to weed killer poured into the oceans: why there had been no massive, last-ditch effort to close the toy box before we could steal all the best toys. We had people all over the planet, people like me, raised in human homes, raised to be culturally aware of the regions where we lived. We knew what the risks were. It only stood to reason that all across the world, we had been able to stand up and shut down the systems that might have destroyed us.

We had infiltrated them in the guise of their own children. We had done it not knowing what we did, following the programming given to us by horticulturists who moved among the stars like comets, carrying their gardens with them, scattering their seeds across the cosmos. This would never have been possible, not in this form, without us.

I felt a pang of regret. I felt a much stronger flood of pride. The final door was closing on my time on Earth, and I was standing on the correct side.

// people are always dying // said First implacably. // the history of this garden is an endless line of people dying. we did not put the weapons in your hands. we did not order you to use them. most of all, we sent you warning. we sent you our own precious children, to tell you we were coming, to give you the opportunity to say “no, no, turn aside.” you did not listen to them. you did not listen to us. and when we came, as we had said we would come, you cried “how dare you tell the truth” and greeted us with war. even before we raised a thorn against you, you greeted us with war. what we do now is justified by your own actions. we are the monsters you have made. //

Carefully, as precisely as possible, I relayed my mother’s words to the vice-president and her people. Vice-President Rogers’s face fell at first, before settling into a blank neutrality that spoke of greater pain held captive behind it, where no one would be required to see.

Finally, she asked, “If this is so, why did you send a negotiation team at all? Why not just stay safe in the sky and keep slaughtering us? Why risk yourself?”

// you had the raising of my daughter // said First. // I would be a poor mother if I did not thank you, in my way. //

Again, I relayed her words. The vice-president looked from First to me, and back again. At first, it seemed like she could only see our differences, plentiful as they were. Then her eyes adjusted, and she began focusing on the shades of green, the way we mirrored them between us. There was a family resemblance, just… not as Earth eyes understood it.

“How is this thanking me?” she asked.

Graham’s hand was a warm anchor on my arm, a reminder that no matter how far we went, we would never leave Earth entirely behind. It would always be with us, in the shapes we wore, the words we spoke aloud between ourselves, rather than the ones that were thrown through the pollen and translated into a dozen, a hundred, a thousand alien tongues.

“The harvest is coming,” I said, standing a little straighter. I felt First’s approving eyes on me. Had she been in my position once, with her own parent, under an alien sky? Was this how our genus cultivated diplomats? This conversation, or something like it, was happening over and over again, all over the planet. Other Firsts and other children, explaining the inevitable, because it was the polite thing to do before we devoured the world. “Earth was given the opportunity to refuse it, and didn’t. It was a problem for tomorrow, and there were things to be done today. Humans have never been good at that math. The ships aren’t leaving; the dying isn’t going to stop. But it can be over quickly, if you want it to be.”

“Never,” spat the vice-president, her lips drawing back in a snarl. “ Now! ”

More guards rose from behind the line of SUVs, all of them armed. I flung my arms wide, trying to block Graham from the hail of bullets I knew was coming. His body was flesh and blood; he couldn’t heal like I could.

// yes // said First sadly. // now. //

The sky above us began to scream as the rest of Hunter’s copse dropped out of the trees and into a sharply banked descent, their wings folded and their jaws gaping wide. Hunter launched himself upward to join them. The vice-president’s guards, faced with a choice between shooting two civilians—even if one of them was green—and a horrifying nightmare spider that, while huge, had done nothing to threaten them, or a sky full of aerial escapees from Jurassic Park, began firing wildly upward.

Hunter’s copse flew through the bullets, shrieking and batting their wings at the guards. The sound of ripping filled the air, underscored by the understandable sound of screams. Through it all, First remained calm, looking at the vice-president with the serenity of a conqueror who knew that her hour had come around at last.

// now // she murmured. // are you ready to listen? //