Page 7 of Overgrowth

Chapter 4

Seattle, Washington: July 19, 2031

Nineteen days pre-invasion

1.

The airport arrivals gate was surprisingly empty. According to Mandy and her hawkish passion for the news, air travel had dropped almost thirty percent since the alien signal was intercepted. People had already started canceling nonessential travel, saying they’d changed their plans, when they’d really stopped wanting to leave the ground.

The alien signal had been ripped apart and put back together by every research institute and think tank in the world, with at least half openly releasing their findings to the public, and some members of the remaining half finding ways to quietly leak their own findings. So far, no one had managed to discredit the thing. If anything, they were proving it more and more conclusively, finding tiny artifacts that spoke to an utterly inhuman method of constructing and compressing the signal.

People were still hoping the alien visitors would be coming in peace, but they were keeping their feet on the ground until they knew one way or another. Fear is a powerful motivator when it comes to that sort of thing.

Passengers began trickling through the gate. I bounced up onto my toes, earning a sour look from the woman next to me, and waved wildly at a short, disheveled man in khakis. Graham paused, face blank, before slowly grinning and trotting toward me. Not running—running in an airport is a good way to attract the attention of the TSA, and no one enjoys that—but moving fast, wasting no time.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me off the ground. I squeaked. Then he was kissing me, whiskers rough against my skin, and for a moment I focused on that to the exclusion of anything else. Graham was here. I was here. The world was changing, but it had not yet changed enough to make a moment like this one impossible, no matter how improbable it might one day seem.

The kiss ended. Graham grinned, close enough that I could see the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I reached out and pressed the tip of one finger against the web of lines.

“When did we get so old ?” I asked.

He laughed and put me down. “That’s what you ask? Not ‘How was your flight’ or ‘Did you want to grab something to eat before we go back through security,’ but ‘When did we get so old’? Are you having some kind of existential crisis on me here?”

“I just missed you,” I said. He removed one arm from my waist, letting me pull my suitcase with my free hand while I used the other to guide him toward the baggage claim. “And this was your idea.”

“Yes, when I thought I could get a connecting flight,” he said, doing his best to sound pitiful. “I didn’t expect to need to change airlines. I’m doing airport security twice in one day. You should feel sorry for me.”

“I always feel sorry for you,” I said. “You are a sad, sad example of a human being.”

“I know.” He kissed my temple. “I don’t know what I did to deserve your tolerance, but I’m thankful every day that I can manage to keep it up.”

I snorted. We kept walking.

The baggage carousel was another demonstration of just how much people were curtailing their flight plans. Only about half the normal allotment of bags came tumbling down the belt, and many of those were overstuffed beyond all logical limits, like their owners were planning to stay awhile. Graham squeezed my fingers reassuringly until his own battered brown suitcase appeared. Then he let me go, retrieved it, and dragged it to the nearest trash can, where he began stripping off the identifying tags that might send it right back to Seattle if he checked it as-is.

“There were no issues getting away from the survey?” I asked, for what felt like the eightieth time. It was probably closer to the eighteenth: it was too many, no matter how I sliced it.

I was nervous. We were going to Maine, one step closer to finding out whether my entire life had been one long lie, and I was nervous.

“None,” Graham assured me patiently. He didn’t sound bothered. Then again, he’d had plenty of practice calming me down when I decided to get worked up about something.

We met in the same class, but we got to know each other because we had a friend in common—Carlos, who had long since gone off to wherever it is college friends go when you’re not in college anymore; having a life without needing to structure it around class schedules and the need to win another round of Trivial Pursuit: The Tequila Edition. Carlos had been infamous for his mixers, which were somewhere between a Star Trek convention and a bacchanal.

Graham, who had been going by another name then, had been seated at my table for a game of Truth or Dare. We’d both been asked to reveal one truth about ourselves that people frequently doubted.

“I’m an alien,” I’d said, and people had cheered, because why the hell not? We were in college, we were open-minded scientists in training, and if I wanted to come from space, I could damn well come from space.

“I’m a man,” Graham had said, and people had laughed, because he was still on his parents’ insurance, and they hadn’t been paying for his hormone replacement therapy yet, and he hadn’t wanted to cut off his hair until he was really starting his transition. So they’d looked at him, these geniuses in waiting, these future architects of the world, and they’d seen a woman with identity issues instead of the man he was, and they laughed.

But they hadn’t laughed at me, because me claiming to be an alien who looked like their idea of a woman was more reasonable to them than Graham claiming to be a man who looked like their idea of a woman. They knew what the world was supposed to be shaped like. Somehow I, with my utter rejection of humanity, fit the mold better than Graham did for rejecting what they wanted him to be.

He’d been upset. I’d been enraged. I hadn’t been shy about letting them know, either, ripping them up one side and down the other for being disrespectful assholes who didn’t deserve to be allowed to have nice things or make good discoveries or survive the inevitable invasion of their world. Graham had been quiet at first, cheeks red and hands shaking, but by the time I’d finished yelling, he’d been grinning, relaxed, and even amused as he watched the show.

We’d walked out of that party together, and made out sloppy and happily drunk behind my dorm before going our separate ways, promising to try this again when we were sober. We had, and then we’d tried again to be sure we’d enjoyed it, and by the time we’d gotten around to try number three, we’d been pretty comfortable with the whole idea. We didn’t start dating right away—that had taken another year and a half, until Graham had started HRT and felt comfortable enough in his own skin to feel up to a full-time girlfriend—but we’d been together, one way or another, ever since.

The line at the airline check-in counter was short enough that I was relaxed when we started toward security, now free of our suitcases. We each had a carry-on bag, while I also had a purse stuffed with snacks, anti-nausea medication, and external batteries. Planes are supposedly equipped with outlets these days, but they’re broken about half the time, and even when they’re not, there’s always the risk of running into a seatmate who needs to take up more than their share of the plugs for “just a moment,” which always turns into the entire flight.

We came around the corner. The security line came into view. I stopped dead, astonished by the scope of it.

“It wasn’t like this in Florida,” said Graham, sounding as bemused as I felt.

It seemed impossible for the line to be this long, snaking past three visible checkpoints and extending down the length of the terminal, unless it hadn’t moved since the airport opened. There weren’t enough people flying to have created this sort of logjam. Even the TSA PreCheck line, normally a haven for businessmen and frequent travelers, was long enough to reach the end of the temporary corral constructed from rope lines and moveable barriers.

There were police everywhere I looked. Some were armed. Others were being towed along by serious-looking canines, the dogs with their noses pressed to the airport floor, the handlers with dour expressions on their faces.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

“It’s all right,” said Graham. He slipped his hand back into mine, squeezing my fingers. I flashed him a grateful smile. He smiled back, looking only slightly strained, as we made for the PreCheck line. It was a frivolous expenditure on our part, and I don’t care for what it represents—Mandy calls the whole system yet another punishment for the poor, and she’s not wrong—but Graham signed up the second it became an option, choosing to pay a fee and submit to a background check rather than continue the humiliating, sometimes dangerous practice of going through normal security lines while trans.

PreCheck meant metal detectors and civility rather than body scans and hostility. PreCheck meant less of a chance of a pat- down, or of his male agent asking loudly whether he wouldn’t prefer a woman. In short, PreCheck was a way to pay for dignity, and Graham had been… not happy, exactly, to do it, but relieved when his Known Traveler Number came through.

When I fly, I’m almost always flying with Graham, or on my way to meet him and fly somewhere else. Signing up for the service, borderline predatory as it is, only made sense. And normally, it meant we could cut our airport arrivals a little closer, since there was never as much of a line. Not so, today.

One of the canine units cruised by, ears swiveling toward the slightest sound. Graham tightened his grip on my hand. We kept walking.

“Excuse me.”

The voice was loud, assertive, and authoritarian: it was the voice of someone who didn’t expect to be ignored. Graham and looked behind us. The agent attached to the canine unit was eyeing us. So was the canine unit. It looked as suspicious as I think it’s possible for a dog to look, muzzle up, eyes alert, ears slicked back against its head.

“Yes, officer?” I said, letting go of Graham to turn.

“I need you to come with me.”

It took everything I had not to turn to Graham in terror. I’d been hoping for some confirmation of whether these were my people, finally coming to collect me after leaving me adrift in a sea of humans for thirty years. This wasn’t how I’d wanted to receive it.

“Is there a problem, officer?” asked Graham, mirroring my turn. We couldn’t hold hands anymore, thanks to our carry-ons, but I still felt better knowing that he was with me, that he would be with me no matter what.

“Routine security screening,” said the officer. “This young lady has been randomly selected. You can continue.”

“Is it okay if I don’t?” Graham leaned forward and whispered, almost conspiratorially, “That line is incredibly long, and I know my girlfriend will pass whatever screening you’re planning to perform with flying colors. If I can come with her, maybe we can still catch our plane.”

“We both have PreCheck,” I added, possibly nonsensically.

The officer frowned before nodding and saying, “We’re allowed to screen as many passengers as we feel necessary to preserve the safety of this airport. Come with me, please.”

It felt like the whole line turned to stare at us as we followed the security officer, and the still-serious dog, away. I squared my shoulders and kept my chin up, reminding myself that I would never see any of these people again. None of them mattered. None of them were ever going to have the opportunity to matter.

I just had to get to Maine.